Edward Lear

Edward Lear
Edward Lear, circa 1867
Edward Lear, circa 1867
Born(1812-05-12)12 May 1812
Holloway, Middlesex, England
Died29 January 1888(1888-01-29) (aged 75)
Sanremo, Liguria, Italy
OccupationArtist, illustrator, writer, poet and musician.
CitizenshipBritish, Italian
Period19th century
GenreChildren's literature, literary nonsense and limericks.
Notable worksA Book of Nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat

Edward Lear (12 May 1812[1][2] – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, and is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes, and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.


Early years

Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of 21 children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker formerly working for the family sugar refining business.[3][4] He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann, 21 years his senior. Jeremiah Lear ended up defaulting to the London Stock Exchange in the economic upheaval following the Napoleonic Wars;[5] owing to the family's now more limited finances, Lear and his sister were required to leave the family home, Bowmans Lodge, and live together when he was aged four. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother for him until her death, when he was almost 50 years of age.[6]



Masada on the Dead Sea, Edward Lear, 1858

Lear was already drawing "for bread and cheese" by the time he was aged 16 and soon developed into a serious "ornithological draughtsman" employed by the Zoological Society and then from 1832 to 1836 by the Earl of Derby, who kept a private menagerie at his estate, Knowsley Hall. He was the first major bird artist to draw birds from real live birds, instead of skins. Lear's first publication, published when he was 19 years old, was Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots in 1830.[8] One of the greatest ornithological artists of his era, he taught Elizabeth Gould whilst also contributing to John Gould's works and was compared favourably to the naturalist John James Audubon. His eyesight deteriorated too much to work with such precision on the fine drawings and etchings of plates used in lithography, thus he turned to landscape painting and travel.[9]

Among other travels, he visited Greece and Egypt during 1848–49, and toured India during 1873–75, including a brief detour to Ceylon. While travelling he produced large quantities of coloured wash drawings in a distinctive style, which he converted later in his studio into oil and watercolour paintings, as well as prints for his books.[10] His landscape style often shows views with strong sunlight, with intense contrasts of colour.

Between 1878 and 1883 Lear spent his summers on Monte Generoso, a mountain on the border between the Swiss canton of Ticino and the Italian region of Lombardy. His oil painting The Plains of Lombardy from Monte Generoso is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.[11][12]


Illustrated Excursions in Italy (1842–46)

Painting of Celano

In 1842 Lear began a journey into the Italian peninsula, travelling through the Lazio, Rome, Abruzzo, Molise, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicily. In personal notes, together with drawings, Lear gathered his impressions on the Italian way of life, folk traditions, and the beauty of the ancient monuments. Of particular interest to Lear was the Abruzzo, which he visited in 1843, through the Marsica (Celano, Avezzano, Alba Fucens, Trasacco) and the plateau of Cinque Miglia (Castel di Sangro and Alfedena), by an old sheep track of the shepherds.

Lear drew a sketch of the medieval village of Albe with Mount Sirente, and described the medieval village of Celano, with the castle of Piccolomini dominating the vast plain of Lago Fucino, which was drained a few years later to promote agricultural development. At Castel di Sangro, Lear described the winter stillness of the mountains and the beautiful basilica.

Composer and musician

Lear in 1887, a year before his death.

Lear primarily played the piano, but he also played the accordion, flute, and guitar. He composed music for many Romantic and Victorian poems, but was known mostly for his many musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. He published four settings in 1853, five in 1859, and three in 1860. Lear's were the only musical settings that Tennyson approved of. Lear also composed music for many of his nonsense songs, including "The Owl and the Pussy-cat," but only two of the scores have survived, the music for "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò" and "The Pelican Chorus". While he never played professionally, he did perform his own nonsense songs and his settings of others' poetry at countless social gatherings, sometimes adding his own lyrics (as with the song "The Nervous Family"), and sometimes replacing serious lyrics with nursery rhymes.[13]


Lear's most fervent and painful friendship was with Franklin Lushington. He met the young barrister in Malta in 1849 and then toured southern Greece with him. Lear developed an infatuation for him that Lushington did not wholly reciprocate. Although they remained friends for almost forty years, until Lear's death, the disparity of their feelings constantly tormented Lear. Indeed, Lear's attempts at male companionship were not always successful; the very intensity of Lear's affections may have doomed these relationships.[14]

The closest he came to marriage was two proposals, both to the same woman 46 years his junior, which were not accepted. For companions he relied instead on friends and correspondents, and especially, during later life, on his Albanian Souliote chef, Giorgis, a faithful friend and, as Lear complained, a thoroughly unsatisfactory chef.[15] Another trusted companion in San Remo was his cat, Foss, who died in 1886 and was buried with some ceremony in a garden at Villa Tennyson.

San Remo and death



Lear's grave in San Remo, Italy.



                              all things fair.
With such a pencil, such a pen.
You shadow'd forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there.[18]


Other Languages
العربية: إدوارد لير
تۆرکجه: ادوارد لیر
беларуская: Эдвард Лір
català: Edward Lear
čeština: Edward Lear
Cymraeg: Edward Lear
Deutsch: Edward Lear
Ελληνικά: Έντουαρντ Λίαρ
español: Edward Lear
Esperanto: Edward Lear
français: Edward Lear
galego: Edward Lear
հայերեն: Էդվարդ Լիր
Bahasa Indonesia: Edward Lear
italiano: Edward Lear
kernowek: Edward Lear
magyar: Edward Lear
မြန်မာဘာသာ: အက်ဒွပ် လီယာ
Nordfriisk: Edward Lear
ਪੰਜਾਬੀ: ਐਡਵਰਡ ਲਿਅਰ
polski: Edward Lear
português: Edward Lear
română: Edward Lear
русский: Лир, Эдвард
svenska: Edward Lear
українська: Едвард Лір