A Blog of Bosh

Edward Lear, The Campagna di Roma taken from Cervara.
Signed with monogram (lower left); signed, inscribed and dated ‘The Campagna di Roma taken from… of Cervara,/looking East to the Sabine Hills/Painted from drawings made on the spot in 1859, 1860; and completed by me for/ Walter Congreve Esq. in 1871/ Edward Lear/ San Remo’ (on a label on the reverse). Oil on canvas. 65 x 129.5cm (25 9/16 x 51in).

Provenance
Commissioned directly from the artist by Walter Congreve Esq., San Remo.

Literature
Edward Lear, List of Pictures Painted, 1840-1877, no. 240, as: Campagna di Roma. Quarries of Cerbara.

The Elements- trees, clouds, &c.,-silence…seem to have far more part with me or I with them, than mankind.
(Edward Lear, 1862, quoted in Vivien Noakes, The Painter Edward Lear, 1991, p. 8)

Edward Lear travelled to Rome for the first time in December 1837, and he spent most of his time in the city until 1848, returning subsequently in the winters of 1859-60, 1871 and 1877. Each summer the artist would spend time exploring other parts of Italy. Lear started painting in oil in 1838. His compositions were mostly created in his studio starting from his travel sketchbooks, as per the present lots.
The artist was fascinated by the beauty and force of nature that led him to create the most poetic of views and landscapes. Rome and its surroundings acted as a great source of inspiration for Lear and lead him to the creation of his first travel book, Views in Rome and its environs, published in 1841.
The present lots were painted starting from sketches made by Lear on the spot in the tufa quarries of Cervara, east of Rome, during winter 1859-60. He wrote ‘there is a charm about this Campagna when it becomes all purple & gold, which it is difficult to tear one’s self from. Thus-climate & beauty of atmosphere regain their hold on the mind-pen & pencil'[1]
The present and subsequent lots were painted for Walter Congreve Esq., a friend and neighbour of Lear in San Remo, where the artist lived from 1870. Congreve sold Lear a plot adjacent to that of his Villa on which to build the first house the painter owned, Villa Emily. Congreve was the British Vice-Consul in San Remo from 1873 to 1885.
A watercolour by Lear of this same area was sold in these rooms in 2014 (Bonhams Knightsbridge, 9 September 2014, lot 31, see fig 1).

[1] Edward Lear, Letter to Ann, 27 March 1848.

Bonhams.

Edward Lear, The Campagna di Roma.
Signed with monogram (lower left); further signed, inscribed and dated ‘The Campagna di Roma. Taken from the Quarries of Cerbara, looking/ South-East towards the Volscian Hills & Alban Mount./ Commenced by me from drawings made on the spot in 1859-1860 & completed/for Walter Congreve Esq. in 1871/ Edward Lear./ San Remo/ June 18.1871’ (on a label on the reverse). Oil on canvas. 65 x 129.5cm (25 9/16 x 51in).

Provenance
Commissioned directly from the artist by Walter Congreve Esq., San Remo.

Literature
Edward Lear, List of pictures painted, 1840-1877, no. 241, as Campagna di Roma. Quarries of Cerbara.

Bonhams.

We missed these nice pictures, early experiments in oil on paper by Lear, when preparing the Amalfi catalogue.

Edward Lear, Corpo di Cava.
Inscribed ‘Corpo di Cava’ and dated ’25 July 1838′. Pencil drawing of mother and child on reverse. Oil on paper. 5 ½ x 8 ¾ inches.

Early in 1837, a group of subscribers, led by the Earl of Derby and his cousin, Robert Hornby, commissioned Edward Lear to go to Rome to produce drawings (and, at the same time, to improve the state of his health). It would be his third trip to the Continent, but his first to Italy. He left England in July that year, and arrived in Rome in the December. Apart from two visits to England in 1841 and 1845-46, he then remained in Italy for a decade.
Each summer of that decade, Lear would travel to a different part of the country. In May 1838, he made a slow journey to Naples in the company of fellow artist, James Uwins. On their arrival, they found that they were staying in the same hotel – the Hotel de La Ville de Rome – as Samuel Palmer and his wife, Hannah, who were in the middle of their Italian honeymoon. However, Lear found Naples ‘all noise, horror – dirt, heat – & abomination’ (as he expressed in a letter to John Gould in the following year, on 17 October 1839). So, after a few days, he and Uwins moved on.

Travelling in a south-easterly direction, they settled at Corpo di Cava, a village situated at the head of a high wooded valley looking down to the Bay of Salerno. It had been the haunt of artists since the time
of Poussin and Rosa, and James Uwins’ uncle, Thomas Uwins RA, had painted there 10 years before, which may have prompted his and Lear’s visit. There they established a daily pattern of walking and sketching, punctuated by some longer expeditions, including that, in the middle of June, to the classical ruins of Paestum, which dominate the coastline about 30 miles south of Salerno.

Late in June, Lear and Uwins moved from Corpo di Cava to Amalfi, on the coast west of Salerno, and stayed for three weeks at the Albergo Cappucini, until 18 July. The visitors’ book reveals that they overlapped with Achille Vianelli and Ercole Gigante, two landscape painters of the School of Posillipo. It was following their return to Corpo di Cava in late July that Lear produced Collecting Water, Corpo di Cava. This shows Lear experimenting with oil – on paper – for the first time, sometimes purely and sometimes in conjunction with other, water-based media. His decade in Italy is defined in part by his decision to take seriously to oils. He and Uwins finally left Corpo di Cava at the beginning of August, in order to stay in Sorrento, on the southern extreme of the Bay of Naples. At the end of the month, they began their slow return to Rome.

‘Chris Beetles Summer Show’, 2020, No 29.

Edward Lear, Vietri sul mare.
Oil with watercolour and bodycolour.

Edward Lear, On the Road to Vietri sul mare.
Signed, inscribed “Vietra” and “13”, and dated “July 1838”. Pencil with bodycolour.

Edward Lear, View of Genoa.
Pen and brown ink and brown, pink and blue wash.

23 Decenmber 1864.