Several documents from the 1880s now examined at YCBA have proved a spur to relook at how Lear dealt with his large stock of drawings as he neared the end of his life, an issue previously examined by Hope Mayo of the Houghton Library a decade ago.[i]
The majority of Lear’s drawings first appeared on the London market in 1929, over forty years after his death in 1888. Three significant sales at auction took place that year, as well as a private sale of many drawings undertaken by Mildred Lushington, one of Lushington’s daughters, to the Tunbridge Wells dealers, Craddock and Barnard, who later traded in Museum Street in central London.[ii] Two of the auction sales as well as the private sale derived from the drawings and diaries left by Lear to Franklin Lushington who also acted as his executor. The third auction sale, coincidentally in the same year, was of Lord Northbrook’s collection of some 3,000 of Lear’s drawings, primarily from his long visit to India and Ceylon in the 1870s but also from other drawings Lear had given to him in 1886. These were contained in two of Lear’s cabinets, acquired by 1935 by W.B.O. Field and which are now at the Houghton Library.
A detailed account of these transactions and their outcomes is given in Hope Mayo’s paper referred to above[iii].
However Lear’s diaries describing his disposal of a large part of his drawings in 1886 do not appear to have been systematically studied before. One of the YCBA documents lists in faint pencil all the 115 sketches of Sinai on 70 mounts, which Mayo records from Lear’s diaries of February 1886 were sent to Rev.John.E.Cross who had accompanied him on his 1849 journey there, and much later helped him with the financing of Villa Tennyson, his last home in San Remo.[iv] Between January and May 1886 numerous diary entries record his major effort to distribute most of his original drawings. Whilst there is no single diary entry which sums up this objective, Lear records packing up to thirteen numbered cases, of which the Cross one was the first. He must have seen this process as a settling of debts, both formal and informal. As well as the gift to Cross, he sent drawings of the Ionian islands to Lord Aberdare and most importantly up to eight cases in April and May to Lord Northbrook, both of whom had also helped him with the Villa Tennyson financing.
The Northbrook cases took on more formality as the settlement of a loan as on 2 April he records receiving a stamped receipt from Lord Northbrook discharging the debt, in advance of Lear sending him what must have been the drawings promised. Lear writes in that day’s diary ‘I ought to be thankful for much good today: Northbrook’s letter and quittance of the 2000£ loan’. Five of these cases were sent on 13 April, and a further one on 7 May. The other two cases contained early Italian views and unspecified unmounted sketches, and it is uncertain whether these went to Northbrook or to someone else.
The drawings for Northbrook probably numbered over 3,000 as they included the 2,000 from his visit to India and Ceylon which Northbrook had sponsored, over 160 mounts of Italian drawings (300 of the Italian drawings included were later pasted for Northbrook into the seven volumes which are now with the Liverpool Libraries), all his 360 or so Corsican drawings, and others from other parts of Italy, Albania, Palestine and Cannes and Nice.
In addition to the above he sent two cases, nos.4 and 5, to Franklin Lushington on 17 March. From their contents these seem more by way of recognising their long friendship and places they had been in together, as they include 130 mounts of the Morea and northern Greece from 1849 and 87 mounts of Corfu and the Ionian islands. There are also Maltese drawings, and Lushington’s brother Henry had been chief secretary to the Maltese government. In his diary for 9 March 1886 Lear describes his Malta and Gozo work as ‘a wondrously perfect realization of those islands’. Less explicable are a large number of Cretan mounts. The YCBA documents include, as well as the many lists made by or for Lushington referred to in section 1, very brief descriptive location titles of these two case contents.[v]
The majority of Lear’s drawings first appeared on the London market in 1929, over forty years after his death in 1888. Three significant sales at auction took place that year, as well as a private sale of many drawings undertaken by Mildred Lushington, one of Lushington’s daughters, to the Tunbridge Wells dealers, Craddock and Barnard, who later traded in Museum Street in central London.[ii] Two of the auction sales as well as the private sale derived from the drawings and diaries left by Lear to Franklin Lushington who also acted as his executor. The third auction sale, coincidentally in the same year, was of Lord Northbrook’s collection of some 3,000 of Lear’s drawings, primarily from his long visit to India and Ceylon in the 1870s but also from other drawings Lear had given to him in 1886. These were contained in two of Lear’s cabinets, acquired by 1935 by W.B.O. Field and which are now at the Houghton Library.
A detailed account of these transactions and their outcomes is given in Hope Mayo’s paper referred to above[iii].
However Lear’s diaries describing his disposal of a large part of his drawings in 1886 do not appear to have been systematically studied before. One of the YCBA documents lists in faint pencil all the 115 sketches of Sinai on 70 mounts, which Mayo records from Lear’s diaries of February 1886 were sent to Rev.John.E.Cross who had accompanied him on his 1849 journey there, and much later helped him with the financing of Villa Tennyson, his last home in San Remo.[iv] Between January and May 1886 numerous diary entries record his major effort to distribute most of his original drawings. Whilst there is no single diary entry which sums up this objective, Lear records packing up to thirteen numbered cases, of which the Cross one was the first. He must have seen this process as a settling of debts, both formal and informal. As well as the gift to Cross, he sent drawings of the Ionian islands to Lord Aberdare and most importantly up to eight cases in April and May to Lord Northbrook, both of whom had also helped him with the Villa Tennyson financing.
The Northbrook cases took on more formality as the settlement of a loan as on 2 April he records receiving a stamped receipt from Lord Northbrook discharging the debt, in advance of Lear sending him what must have been the drawings promised. Lear writes in that day’s diary ‘I ought to be thankful for much good today: Northbrook’s letter and quittance of the 2000£ loan’. Five of these cases were sent on 13 April, and a further one on 7 May. The other two cases contained early Italian views and unspecified unmounted sketches, and it is uncertain whether these went to Northbrook or to someone else.
The drawings for Northbrook probably numbered over 3,000 as they included the 2,000 from his visit to India and Ceylon which Northbrook had sponsored, over 160 mounts of Italian drawings (300 of the Italian drawings included were later pasted for Northbrook into the seven volumes which are now with the Liverpool Libraries), all his 360 or so Corsican drawings, and others from other parts of Italy, Albania, Palestine and Cannes and Nice.
In addition to the above he sent two cases, nos.4 and 5, to Franklin Lushington on 17 March. From their contents these seem more by way of recognising their long friendship and places they had been in together, as they include 130 mounts of the Morea and northern Greece from 1849 and 87 mounts of Corfu and the Ionian islands. There are also Maltese drawings, and Lushington’s brother Henry had been chief secretary to the Maltese government. In his diary for 9 March 1886 Lear describes his Malta and Gozo work as ‘a wondrously perfect realization of those islands’. Less explicable are a large number of Cretan mounts. The YCBA documents include, as well as the many lists made by or for Lushington referred to in section 1, very brief descriptive location titles of these two case contents.[v]
At around the same time that these drawings were despatched to Northbrook and Lushington, Lear also sent three of the cabinets which contained them to Northbrook and two to Lushington.[vi] The two cabinets which came to the Houghton Library with the Northbrook collection were found in recent years to have ‘destra’ and ‘sinistra’ scrawled on the inside of the cabinet backs, probably indicating that these particular cabinets were made for Lear’s San Remo house and instructions of right and left would have helped the furniture movers in placing them in the intended room.[vii] As Lear already had five cabinets when he moved in to Villa Emily in 1871, it is quite possible he had two more made after his Indian travels in the mid-1970s as a store place would have been needed for 2,000 more drawings. If these were the cabinets which held Lear’s Indian drawings which constituted a large part of his gift to Northbrook, it is not surprising that these two cabinets also followed the drawings to Stratton Park, Northbrook’s house in Hampshire.
His retention in San Remo of two of his seven cabinets after disposing of many of his drawings in 1886 may well be explained because of the many drawings he retained. At some point after all these cases were despatched, Lear made out a further list included in the YCBA documents of the number ‘of drawings (Mounts,) left, – after the Cases sent to England – can give (?) away. (unmounted drawings not included)’.[viii]
There follows a list of twenty journeys with their dates and for each the figure of mounts remaining, totalling 1,811. The number of drawings retained on these mounts will have been significantly larger than this figure where drawings were small and more than one could be laid on a mount. These include large numbers of his early Italian journeys, his two main Egyptian travels and both visits to Palestine, and his early travels in Greece and Albania and later to Mount Athos. The final destination of these is described below.
His final will which he remade in 1886 left all his remaining art, drawings, watercolours and oils, to Franklin Lushington. An attempt has been made as part of my research to match all this evidence with the YCBA Lushington lists, and then to what is known to have come to the market in 1929 and eventually reached the four main holdings of drawings at Houghton, YCBA itself, Liverpool Libraries and the Gennadius Library in Athens.
The drop down to this page, Disposals in Detail, derives from the number of drawings estimated to have resulted from each journey as shown earlier in the Lear Drawings by Journey section. Further columns show the drawings given away in 1886 by Lear noted above, the mounted drawings which Lear then still retained, and the evidence from the Lushington documents at YCBA of what he was still retaining after Lear’s death.
We can have no assurance that all the surviving documents prepared by or for Lushington of his holdings, following the gifts to him from Lear in 1886 and the bequest, are comprehensive. Tracking the drawings is complicated by the use by both Lear and Lushington of the number of mounts, rather than numbers of the drawings themselves, given that a few small drawings might appear on one mount. Nevertheless there is a reasonable correspondence, with a few exceptions.
It is likely that some further significant gifts had been made to his friends, either by Lear himself before his death or through a pre-death request to Lushington or on Lushington’s own initiative after 1888.[ix] Such gifts may explain some of the exceptions noted. For example the YCBA papers include a list of all the mounts and drawing numbers for Lear’s visit to Mount Athos in 1856. There were seventy-six mounts made of the drawings. The YCBA document showing the mounts retained after cases had been sent to England shows seventy-five mounts for Mount Athos still held by Lear in San Remo. It is known from the provenance given for auction sales and by museum collections that at least twenty-two of the Athos drawings were with Lear’s friend Charles Church (1823-1915, Canon of Wells Cathedral in the 1890s), and then his descendants[x].
Lear had hoped to travel to Athos with Church in 1848, and had later correspondence with him about the visit he did make in 1856. Their friendship and correspondence continued until shortly before Lear’s death and Church bought works from Lear, but no reference to a gift of drawings is made in Lear’s diaries in his last few years. Nevertheless it is certain that a significant number of the Athos drawings did reach Church personally in his lifetime and provenance details given at auction frequently cite ‘gift of the artist’.
Late in his life Lear was still trying unsuccessfully to find ways to reproduce his Tennyson illustrations. He almost certainly retained some of his drawings in 1886 because, as was the case for his Mount Athos drawings, he still wanted to refer to them in order to complete this project. He never fully succeeded in his aim to ‘topographize & typographize all the journeyings of my life’[xi] But he did make sure that he could wind up the most important part of his estate and pass it on in a methodical and thoughtful way, just as he had organised his studio life in a way which worked well for him over his long years of travel and earning a living.
References
[i] Hope Mayo “The Edward Lear Collection at Harvard University”, (Harvard: The Harvard Library Bulletin, Volume 22: Numbers 2-3, 2011), 85-92.
[ii] Craddock and Barnard no longer exist and their archives are held at University College, London. They were chiefly in trade as print dealers, and when I was able to search their archives I found no record of their transactions in Lear drawings from 1929 to 1957, and little going back to that period.
[iii] The history of one significant transaction of Greek drawings in 1929 is described in my own paper, ‘Edward Lear’s Cretan Drawings’, in The Gennadius Library’s The New Griffon 12, Athens 2011, 103.
[iv] Edward Lear archive, YCBA, box 1, folder 58.
[v] Edward Lear archive, YCBA, box 1, folder 27a.
[vi] Diary entries 26 March and 1, 2 and 8 April, 1886.
[vii] Personal communication to the author from Hope Mayo.
[viii] Edward Lear archive, YCBA, box 1, folder 53.
[ix] Diary entry for 3 March 1886 reads: I am also pretty well decided on returning all the sketches to the upstairs Studio, - & then on making a new Will, leaving everything in the Villa to Frank L who (………..) will then have the power of sending whatever and however I decide to be sent. Thus, I think, I shall be fully clear of all these sketches = troubles.
[x] The website Edward Lear and Mount Athos gives the provenances where known of all the Mount Athos drawings.
[xi] Lady Strachey, Later Letters of Edward Lear to Chichester Fortescue, Frances Countess Waldegrave and Others, 91. This edition wrongly transcribed ‘typographize’.