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Well, ehm, it really looks like a Lear biography but… it’s in Russian! Can anybody confirm?

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Portrait of Catherine Lear

1 Portrait of Catherine Lear
From the National Portrait Gallery, London, a silhouette portrait of Edward’s youngest sister, by an unknown artist.

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Lear, Far and Near

JOHN UPDIKE: Lear, Far and Near
Even during Edward Lear’s lifetime, his nonsense verse tended to detract from the seriousness of his landscape painting. In the corner of a letter Lear had written Ruskin in 1883, the great critic nonresponsively jotted, “Is this the nonsense man?” A few years later, Ruskin in Pall Mall Magazine praised the writer but ignored the artist. Posthumously, appreciation of the art must work its way around (to quote a review from 1930) “the Himalaya of nonsense [whereupon] Edward Lear sits enthroned.” The catalog of one exhibit of his watercolors almost insultingly speaks of “Edward Lear, ‘the landscape painter’ as he was wont to call himself.”
New York Review of Books

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You Elegant Fowl

You Elegant Fowl
This is only the Food column from the New York Times Magazine, but I could not resist the title! No reference to Lear is made in the article.

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A replica of the complete Birds of America

A replica of the complete Birds of America, by Audubon
the only one who could compete with Lear in bird illustration.
This site includes the full text and several indexes, but the scans could be better. Unfortunately, the Elwell Sale Stewart Library seems to have stopped archiving images from its Audubon.

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Foundation for the Preservation of the Hyacinth Macaw

Foundation for the Preservation of the Hyacinth Macaw
A nonprofit foundation incorporated in 1991 with the goal of preserving the Hyacinth Macaw and other birds of the world’s tropics through education, research, ecotourism and captive breeding.
[Has a gallery with some reproductions of Lear’s macaws.]

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Misguided genius

Misguided genius
“I bleed over every phrase,” Raymond Roussel told the psychologist Pierre Janet, who believed that his patient suffered a “displaced form of religious mania” that accounted for “Roussel’s misguided conviction of his literary genius”.
The Sunday Times: Books:

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Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams

Observer review: Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams by Mark Ford
By 30, feeling he had achieved the required ‘sensations of art’, he embarked on the novel Impressions d’Afrique. This reveals an extraordinary world which he elaborated for the rest of his life, suspended, as Cocteau said, ‘from elegance, fairyland and fear’ and full of inventors, virtuosi and miraculous inventions. A worm, for instance, in a trough full of a strange water as heavy as mercury with a narrow slit in its base, suspended above a zither. Trained by a Hungarian musician, the worm arches its body to regulate the flow of drops on to the zither and thus plays wondrously complex rhapsodies and waltzes with ‘a savagely dramatic range of expression’. Entering his flood of stories is, as Andr� Gide said, like being swept up in a Gulf Stream of the imagination.
Books Unlimited

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Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey
No one sheds light on darkness from quite the same perspective as this Cape Cod specialist in morbid, fine-lined jocularity.
[This is a long article on Gorey’s career from Salon’s ‘Brilliant Careers’ series. A ‘Gorey Gallery’ is also included.]
Salon People

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Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The following items link to pages in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, with descriptions of collections containing Edward Lear material.

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