A Blog of Bosh

View of Monte Pellegrino, Palermo, 1847.
Dated ‘July 13, 1847’ and further inscribed ‘(235)’ twice (lower right) .
pencil and oil on paper, laid down on board. 8½ x 15¼ in. (21.6 x 40 cm.).

Lear visited Sicily for the first time in 1842. This oil sketch was done during his second trip to the island in 1847, perhaps unusually, in situ. Lear typically sketched out-of-doors and then finished his oils in his studio. In this case, the seemingly rapidly executed brushstrokes on a sheet of paper laid down on board suggests that he made this oil sketch outside of Palermo. Monte Pellegrino is located on the Bay of Palermo and is home to the sanctuary of Saint Rosalia, the patron saint of the city. The numbering ‘235’ is Lear’s own numbering of his works. Every time he entered a new country, he would start numbering his sketches beginning at ‘1’.

Christie’s.

Andora, Italy. Inscribed and dated ‘Andora/28 December 1864/11 AM’ (lower right) and inscribed again and dated ‘Andora/11 30 AM/28 December 1864’ (lower left) and numbered ‘(109)’ (lower left) and further inscribed with color notes.
Pencil, pen and brown ink, watercolor.
14 1/8 x 20½ in. (35.9 x 52.2 cm.).

Lear left England in November 1864, to spend the winter in the Riviera. Shortly after his arrival he settled down to draw 240 ‘Tyrants’, this task left him exhausted and he decided to spend a few weeks walking along the coast.

At the end of November he set off with his servant Giorgio to walk to Genoa; they walked between sixteen and twenty miles a day, returning to Nice on New Year’s Eve with 145 drawings. As he wrote to William Holman Hunt from the Promenade des Anglais on 7 January 1865, ‘One of my aims this winter was to ‘get’ all the Corniche or Riviera di Ponente; .. that I have done both ways with 145 sketches & better health than before – also less abdomen’. These sketches he ‘penned out’ in the evenings for his possible, but never realised, book (V. Noakes, ed., Edward Lear, Selected Letters, Oxford, 1988, pp. 202-3).

Lear’s technique would be to make a quick pencil sketch with color notations. Back in his studio – or even in his tent later that evening if he was on a long walking trip – he would have ‘penned out’ the composition. That is, he would go over his pencil lines and even his color notations in pen and ink, and fill in the composition with watercolor following his notes. These ‘penned out’ drawings were not meant to be exhibited or sold, but were rather the basis for watercolors commissioned by Lear’s patrons who would visit his studio and choose from among a group of them. Indeed, it was not until 1929, when two large collections belonging to the descendants of Lord Northbrook and Franklin Lushington came up for sale, that this aspect of Lear’s oeuvre became known to the general public.

Christie’s.

View of Mount Olympus, Macedonia and Thessaly, near the Gulf of Salonika
signed in monogram and dated ‘EL·1864’ (lower right).
Oil on panel (Prepared by Charles Roberson 99, Long Acre London)
7 x 11 in. (17.7 x 27.9 cm.).

Lear visited Greece and the Greek islands many times, making so many compositions of various sites throughout the country that he lamented at one point that he would only be remembered for his Greek views. He first visited Greece in the 1840s, and for long periods of time in the late 1850s and early 1860s made the island of Corfu his home base. In 1864 he voyaged to northern Greece to sketch Mount Olympus — the subject of this oil sketch and the highest mountain in the country, located between Thessaly and Macedonia. He described his journey in his diary:

Starting at about seven, we held a southward course; the plain was one unvaried green undulation. Larissa, and even Olympus, except now and then its highest peaks, are soon lost to sight — and it is only from some eminence — that anything like a satisfactory drawing can be made — yet the very simplicity, the extreme exaggeration of the character of a plain is not without its facination; and the vast lines of Thessaly have a wild and dream-like charm of poetry about them, of which it is impossible for pen or pencil to give a fully adequate idea. (Journals of a landscape painter in Albania, pp. 416-417).

A preparatory sketch in pencil, pen, ink and watercolor, made in situ during the 1849 visit described above, and now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (see P. Hofer, Edward Lear as a landscape draughtsman, Cambridge, 1967, pl. 49) was the basis for Lear’s oil sketch made some fifteen years later. The composition was also the basis for an illustration done by Lear in 1885 of one of Tennyson’s poems. Re-using earlier sketches for later studio compositions was typicial of Lear’s working method.

Christie’s.