Edward Lear (British, 1812-1888), Study of an Eagle Owl, 1846
The Eurasian Eagle-Owl is Europe's largest owl, with a wingspan of up to six feet, prominent ear tufts, and huge orange eyes in life. It breeds across Europe, North Africa, and Asia in rocky, wooded country and preys on animals as large as hares, foxes, and other birds of prey. It had long been extinct in Britain, if it was ever a native breeding bird, and it was known to English naturalists chiefly through captive birds and the continental literature.
Lear knew the species well. In the 1830s he drew the Eagle Owl for John Gould’s Birds of Europe (1832–37), one of the most admired plates in that work, and he would have studied living birds in the London menageries and at Knowsley. By 1846 he had given up ornithological illustration for landscape, and the present drawing, made without a specimen before him, shows how thoroughly he had absorbed the owl’s form.
The owl sits upright on a short branch, facing the viewer with grave composure. Lear has built the plumage entirely in pen, with short, hatched strokes for the barred and streaked feathers and longer, flowing lines for the wing and tail, leaving the facial disc and the paler breast in reserve. The result is an image of great presence on a small sheet.
Vivien Noakes observed that Lear “was at his best when drawing majestic, unpretty birds like ravens and owls; he endowed them with sagacious personalities, and it is tempting to wonder if Lear found a common bond with birds, for they too were at the mercy of unscrupulous men.”
The year 1846 was a remarkable one for Lear. He published A Book of Nonsense and his Illustrated Excursions in Italy, and in the summer he gave Queen Victoria a series of drawing lessons at Osborne. Owls run through his nonsense drawings, and a study like this, made for friends, stands between the naturalist he had been and the comic artist he was becoming.
The Drewitt family of Peppering House, near Arundel in Sussex, were among Lear’s oldest friends. His sister Sarah married Charles Street in 1822 and settled near Arundel, so Lear visited the district often from boyhood. Fanny Drewitt married George Coombe, probably in 1831, and the couple lived at Peppering. A group of Lear’s letters to the Coombes, rediscovered in the 1990s and sold at Christie’s on June 29, 1995, is now in the Frederick Warne Archive and provides a valuable record of Lear’s early life and movements.
Lear was already drawing “for bread and cheese” by the time he was aged sixteen 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 nineteen years old, was Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots in 1830. One of the greatest ornithological artists of his era, he taught Elizabeth Gould while also contributing to John Gould’s works and was compared favorably with John James Audubon. Unfortunately his eyesight deteriorated too much to work with such precision on fine drawings and lithographic stones, thus he turned to landscape painting and travel.
In 1842, Lear began a journey into the Italian peninsula, traveling through the Lazio, Rome, Abruzzo, Molise, Apulia, 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. He eventually settled in San Remo, on his beloved Mediterranean coast, in the 1870s, at a villa he named “Villa Tennyson.”
In 1846, Lear published A Book of Nonsense, a volume of limericks that went through three editions and helped popularize the form and the genre of literary nonsense. In 1871, he published Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, which included his most famous nonsense song, The Owl and the Pussycat, which he wrote for the children of his patron Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. Many other works followed.
Lear’s nonsense books were highly popular during his lifetime, but a rumor developed that “Edward Lear” was merely a pseudonym, and the books’ true author was the man to whom Lear had dedicated the works, his patron the Earl of Derby. Promoters of this rumor offered as evidence the facts that both men were named Edward, and that “Lear” is an anagram of “Earl.”
Lear’s nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet’s delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary. A stuffed rhinoceros becomes a “diaphanous doorscraper.” A “blue Boss-Woss” plunges into “a perpendicular, spicular, orbicular, quadrangular, circular depth of soft mud.” His heroes are Quangle-Wangles, Pobbles, and Jumblies. One of his most famous verbal inventions, the phrase “runcible spoon,” occurs in the closing lines of The Owl and the Pussycat, and is now found in many English dictionaries.
Among other travels, he visited Greece and Egypt during 1848–49, and toured India during 1873–75, including a brief detour to Ceylon. While traveling he produced large quantities of colored wash drawings in a distinctive style, which he converted later in his studio into oil and watercolor paintings, as well as prints for his books. His landscape style often shows views with strong sunlight, with intense contrasts of color.
Throughout his life he continued to paint seriously. He had a lifelong ambition to illustrate Tennyson’s poems; near the end of his life a volume with a small number of illustrations was published.
After a long decline in his health, Lear died at his villa in 1888 of heart disease, from which he had suffered since at least 1870.
or by email at loricohen@aradergalleries.
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