The 19th-century artist and poet Edward Lear was an eccentric, lonely sort of figure. He never married and—despite having the means to do so—never owned property until his 60s. Suffering from epilepsy, he considered travel the best way to ward off bouts of illness. And on his journeys he brought a constant companion: a sketchbook.
This new exhibition at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham—on until 13th November—is the first anywhere dedicated to Lear’s personal landscape sketches. Included among them are rugged scenes from Egypt, India, Crete and many other places that at the time would have been accessible to only a select group of adventurous Europeans. (British landscapes are a notable omission.)
Sketchbook drawings, especially those never intended to be seen by the public, can sometimes offer more intriguing insights than an artist’s completed works. Stripped of all pretension, they hint at what really interested them day to day and what kept them going beyond the unpredictable whims of epiphany or inspiration.
In that sense, Lear’s drawings might be surprising to those who know him primarily as the author of whimsical poetry like “The Owl and the Pussy Cat.” For the “nonsense man” he might have been to friends like John Ruskin, Lear’s sketches—and his way of making them—could not be further from the nonsensical.
During his own lifetime, Lear’s best-known imagery was his ornithological illustrations of tropical birds, notably drawn from living subjects, and here his landscapes mirror that fidelity to nature. His style is neat and precise, his lines tightly controlled. Cretan beaches, north African cliffs and Italian forests appear to us exactly as they might have appeared to the eye, or at least as is possible to convey within a few minutes of sketching. Starting with graphite or pencil, Lear would sometimes add watercolour at some later point in the day. Each sketch, however small, is dated, timed and numbered, making Lear something of the archivist’s dream. At Ikon, sketches of the same day or scene that with time fell into separate collections have been brought together again.
Through some of this rigorous documentation, we can glean a few facts about Lear’s process: one, that he was a frighteningly early riser, with many of his sketches drawn between five and eight in the morning; two, that he was incredibly quick, with some very detailed sketches completed within 10 to 15 minutes of one another; and three, with age Lear’s style became increasingly expressive, his adherence to line and colour becoming more fluid and even abstract. (This last feature is only hinted at by the exhibition, which ends with a selection of strikingly impressionistic palm scenes from a December 1874 trip to Kandy in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon.)
What’s really interesting about Lear’s sketching, however, is not his drawing technique per se, but how his literary tendencies creep in. Scattered throughout his landscapes are little notes, a few stray words here or there, idle musings or spare thoughts that must have occurred to him as he sketched. They are not so much written on top of but integrated with the landscape, following the jagged edge of a cliff or along a horizon line so as not to immediately intrude on it. Most of them are prosaic in the extreme, as though Lear was not confident that some imagined viewer would be able to tell what he was drawing. “Shallow” is written over a faint blue Maltese bay; “brown” under a wash of brown watercolour below a cliff; “rock” over the image of a rock. Elsewhere he gets more carried away. “O sand! O cold! O stones! O sand!” he bursts out in a small fragment of verse in an 1864 beach scene from Savona, in Italy. “O Dantesque female!” he exclaims along the bottom of a bay in Corsica, next to a small, spindly looking figure, who does not even look like she belongs in the picture.
After some time searching for these little notes, you realise you are beginning to enter something like Lear’s own mindset as he sketched: preoccupied, distracted perhaps, already looking beyond what was in front of him. Lear’s mind was evidently a restless one: he was constantly figuring out how to depict what he was seeing, while also searching for some way to describe it.
Lear himself might have put that restlessness down to his fear of illness, which obliged him (or so he believed) to be always moving onto the next thing. But maybe a better way of looking at it is as evidence of his inexhaustible creativity. Lear did not sketch to pass the time between moments of inspiration—but because he was constantly inspired by the world around him.
Edward Lear: Moment to Moment is on display at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham from 9th September to 13th November
