Edward Lear and his 9,000 landscape drawings
My recent rediscovery at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) of documents written by Edward Lear himself adds to a growing body of knowledge of the extent of his drawings and the fuller information they can give on his travels. The references in this website to ‘drawings’ refer to the sketches Lear made on location during his travels such as that illustrated here from the YCBA collection.
The drawings were usually in pencil and made as he viewed his scene. Lear then penned in outlines and usually applied some loose colour washes back in his studio. He used them throughout his working life for producing the oil paintings and watercolours for sale which were his main source of income. (Lear sometimes calls his finished watercolours ‘drawings’ as well as ‘watercolours’ in his diaries and letters.)
Lear spent considerable time making his drawings on fifty-three specific journeys or locations over fifty years.[i] Whilst these have previously been listed with dates and locations only, this website for the first time documents them with considerably more detail on the next main page of this website Lear Drawings by Journey, summarised in the following table. Relevant headings are explained below.
Table 1 Lear drawings by journey - summary
Year and months of travel
1835-1884
Country/location
As shown
Minimum number of drawings Lear is estimated to have made on each journey
Total - 8,224
Lear list at YCBA of drawings and mounts made and used
As shown
Lushington list at YCBA of drawings and mounts he held after Lear’s death
As shown
Highest number annotated by Lear on a drawing
Range from 23 to 1,169
Number of drawings now in public collections
Total - 4,921
Research sources now available
As shown
Other sources of description and illustration
As shown
Main public collection sources of drawings
As shown
Number of drawings auctioned 1958-2014
Total - 1,279
His travels began in Britain and then in Italy, but from the late 1840s they extended in particular to Greece, its islands and neighbouring Albania, and to Egypt. They later included Ottoman Syria including Palestine, and Malta, Corsica and the Mediterranean coastal regions of France and Switzerland. Finally from 1873 to 1875 Lear visited India and Ceylon and made extensive drawings there.
In 2018 detailed listings of the drawings in Lear’s own hand for fifteen of these journeys were discovered in the Lear archives at YCBA. No such personal listings had previously been known to exist. The Center received in 1997 the gift of over three hundred Lear drawings, most but not all of Egypt, together with other oil paintings and manuscripts from Donald Gallup, an American collector of Lear’s works since the 1940s. He himself became a Yale University curator and literary bibliographer and in his autobiography he provides an interesting case study of how he built up his personal Lear collection.[ii] He had obtained most of his Lear drawings from the London dealers F.R.Meatyard and Craddock and Barnard who in the 1940s and 50s were still selling from the Lear collections purchased from the Lushington family in 1929, the year in which most Lear drawings came onto the London market for the first time. Gallup tells of a final visit to the Craddock and Barnard London shop in Museum Street in 1957:
I found that they had at last sold out of their Lears, even though one of the partners had earlier told me that he thought they would never see the end of their stock. I managed to persuade him, even so, to rummage around in the back office, and he came up with another oil sketch, of leaves, also done at La Cava, 28 June 1838, a number of unfinished pencil drawings, along with various lists of paintings and sketches – some of them in Lear’s own hand.
Gallup purchased all the remnants found, and they were given to YCBA in 1997 along with his other paintings and drawings.
I have now appraised the ‘various lists of paintings and sketches’ and they throw fresh light on how Lear ran his studio, as well as giving invaluable detailed lists of the drawings for the fifteen journeys. A further group of lists are in his friend and executor Franklin Lushington’s hand or made at his request and appear to record the drawings which had been gifted to him by Lear or were left to him on Lear’s death. There are thus two groups of handwritten lists of travels, most neatly inked though some are in pencil and seem to be rough drafts.[iii] YCBA has developed a finding aid under its Edward Lear archive which references these particular documents which are filed in chronological order of his travels.[iv]
This new primary information will greatly assist the ongoing research conducted into the locations and drawing outputs of specific journeys by Lear. It should also help steer that research into more systematic ways of showing its results. With one earlier exception researchers have begun since 2009 to explore in detail the full extent of the drawings from Lear’s many journeys as a landscape artist.[v] Usually these recent researchers have had a specific outcome in mind – an exhibition catalogue or a website to make images and details of Lear’s works more accessible. The result has been an accumulating record of what Lear drew, often with technical details (record of place, size, dating, often time of day) and provenance and exhibition and publication histories. In several cases relevant surviving correspondence and journal descriptions have been included. The approach has not been consistent but something of a catalogue raisonné is being built up. The Research Source column in the next section on Lear Drawings by Journey give details of the ten travels studied to date which are either in book form or on website.
Thirteen of the fifty-three journeys/locations listed in the next section of this site relate to regions covered by modern Greece and Albania and tally to a minimum of 1,600 drawings. Six of the research studies, by Stephen Duckworth, Dr.Rowena Fowler and Elizabeth Wells, focus on some of these regions, most of which were Ottoman controlled in Lear’s time as a traveller. The other countries researched to date are the United Kingdom and Malta.
Lear has not dated when he made his own lists of the journey drawings held at YCBA. They were specifically used to assist his sales of finished works and so probably date from soon after the specific journey in each case. This is also borne out by paper water-marking where it exists.[vi]
The drawings were usually in pencil and made as he viewed his scene. Lear then penned in outlines and usually applied some loose colour washes back in his studio. He used them throughout his working life for producing the oil paintings and watercolours for sale which were his main source of income. (Lear sometimes calls his finished watercolours ‘drawings’ as well as ‘watercolours’ in his diaries and letters.)
Lear spent considerable time making his drawings on fifty-three specific journeys or locations over fifty years.[i] Whilst these have previously been listed with dates and locations only, this website for the first time documents them with considerably more detail on the next main page of this website Lear Drawings by Journey, summarised in the following table. Relevant headings are explained below.
Table 1 Lear drawings by journey - summary
Year and months of travel
1835-1884
Country/location
As shown
Minimum number of drawings Lear is estimated to have made on each journey
Total - 8,224
Lear list at YCBA of drawings and mounts made and used
As shown
Lushington list at YCBA of drawings and mounts he held after Lear’s death
As shown
Highest number annotated by Lear on a drawing
Range from 23 to 1,169
Number of drawings now in public collections
Total - 4,921
Research sources now available
As shown
Other sources of description and illustration
As shown
Main public collection sources of drawings
As shown
Number of drawings auctioned 1958-2014
Total - 1,279
His travels began in Britain and then in Italy, but from the late 1840s they extended in particular to Greece, its islands and neighbouring Albania, and to Egypt. They later included Ottoman Syria including Palestine, and Malta, Corsica and the Mediterranean coastal regions of France and Switzerland. Finally from 1873 to 1875 Lear visited India and Ceylon and made extensive drawings there.
In 2018 detailed listings of the drawings in Lear’s own hand for fifteen of these journeys were discovered in the Lear archives at YCBA. No such personal listings had previously been known to exist. The Center received in 1997 the gift of over three hundred Lear drawings, most but not all of Egypt, together with other oil paintings and manuscripts from Donald Gallup, an American collector of Lear’s works since the 1940s. He himself became a Yale University curator and literary bibliographer and in his autobiography he provides an interesting case study of how he built up his personal Lear collection.[ii] He had obtained most of his Lear drawings from the London dealers F.R.Meatyard and Craddock and Barnard who in the 1940s and 50s were still selling from the Lear collections purchased from the Lushington family in 1929, the year in which most Lear drawings came onto the London market for the first time. Gallup tells of a final visit to the Craddock and Barnard London shop in Museum Street in 1957:
I found that they had at last sold out of their Lears, even though one of the partners had earlier told me that he thought they would never see the end of their stock. I managed to persuade him, even so, to rummage around in the back office, and he came up with another oil sketch, of leaves, also done at La Cava, 28 June 1838, a number of unfinished pencil drawings, along with various lists of paintings and sketches – some of them in Lear’s own hand.
Gallup purchased all the remnants found, and they were given to YCBA in 1997 along with his other paintings and drawings.
I have now appraised the ‘various lists of paintings and sketches’ and they throw fresh light on how Lear ran his studio, as well as giving invaluable detailed lists of the drawings for the fifteen journeys. A further group of lists are in his friend and executor Franklin Lushington’s hand or made at his request and appear to record the drawings which had been gifted to him by Lear or were left to him on Lear’s death. There are thus two groups of handwritten lists of travels, most neatly inked though some are in pencil and seem to be rough drafts.[iii] YCBA has developed a finding aid under its Edward Lear archive which references these particular documents which are filed in chronological order of his travels.[iv]
This new primary information will greatly assist the ongoing research conducted into the locations and drawing outputs of specific journeys by Lear. It should also help steer that research into more systematic ways of showing its results. With one earlier exception researchers have begun since 2009 to explore in detail the full extent of the drawings from Lear’s many journeys as a landscape artist.[v] Usually these recent researchers have had a specific outcome in mind – an exhibition catalogue or a website to make images and details of Lear’s works more accessible. The result has been an accumulating record of what Lear drew, often with technical details (record of place, size, dating, often time of day) and provenance and exhibition and publication histories. In several cases relevant surviving correspondence and journal descriptions have been included. The approach has not been consistent but something of a catalogue raisonné is being built up. The Research Source column in the next section on Lear Drawings by Journey give details of the ten travels studied to date which are either in book form or on website.
Thirteen of the fifty-three journeys/locations listed in the next section of this site relate to regions covered by modern Greece and Albania and tally to a minimum of 1,600 drawings. Six of the research studies, by Stephen Duckworth, Dr.Rowena Fowler and Elizabeth Wells, focus on some of these regions, most of which were Ottoman controlled in Lear’s time as a traveller. The other countries researched to date are the United Kingdom and Malta.
Lear has not dated when he made his own lists of the journey drawings held at YCBA. They were specifically used to assist his sales of finished works and so probably date from soon after the specific journey in each case. This is also borne out by paper water-marking where it exists.[vi]