Edward Lear (1812-1888)

Although barely twenty, Lear had been working as an artist since the age of fifteen out of necessity after his father’s business failure (Noakes 2006). His first published ornithological drawing was a Great Auk drawn from a specimen in the British Museum in 1831 for Prideaux John Selby’s Illustrations of British Ornithology. However, the published intaglio etching, executed and signed by Selby, bears no stylistic resemblance to Lear’s later work.

Lear was drawn to the newer printing technique of lithography, invented in Germany shortly before 1800, which allowed artists to draw directly with ink or crayon on the blocks of fine-grained limestone that served as printing plates. One of the early lithographic printers in London, Charles Joseph Hullmandel, attracted artists with The Art of Drawing on Stone, a book which explained how to use a greasy crayon (also called chalk) in a portcrayon (holder) to draw on the limestone plates (Fig. 3). The bits of crayon deposited on the fine-textured toothed or grained surface of the stone created the visual effect of graded tones.

In 1830 Lear began self-publishing his own book, Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, with the intention of portraying all members of the parrot family. Drawing from life in the gardens of the Zoological Society of London, Lear effectively captured not only the poses of the birds but also the textures of down and feathers in his crayon drawings on lithographic stone (Jackson 1975, 33-34) (Fig. 4). While Lear’s illustrations were artistically excellent, the book failed and had to be left unfinished due to insufficient sales and the high cost of lithographic printing and hand coloring.

After entering Gould’s employ, Lear shared with Elizabeth Gould the task of drawing the illustrations for her husband’s next project, The Birds of Europe (1831-1837). As well as working in London, they visited zoos and collections of zoological specimens in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, and Rotterdam. Lear contributed 68 of the 448 plates, concentrating on the larger birds, such as the Great Horned Owl (Jackson 1975, 35-36; Lambourne 1987, 37-38). More evident in the uncolored proof print Fig. 5) than in the hand-colored published print (Fig. 6), Gould’s deft crayon shading shows the bird’s features and feathers in greater detail, while the treatment of the setting of foliage, etc. is sketchier. The first edition of Gould’s Family of Toucans (1833-1835), underway during the same period, includes ten plates (of 34 in total) signed by Lear (Lambourne 1987, 40) (Figs. 7 and 8).

In October 1836, though, Lear wrote to Gould to say that his eyesight, always poor, had become “so sadly worse, that no bird under an ostrich should I soon be able to see to do.” Although he assisted Elizabeth Gould with drawing the 36 plates for the Family of Trogons, which began to appear in 1835, the published plates bear only the credit “J. & E. Gould” (Lambourne 1987, 40).  From 1837 until his death Lear lived mainly in southern Europe, where the warm Mediterranean climate was good for his delicate health, and produced travel books (Noakes 2012). His lasting claim to fame rests on his nonsense verse and sketches.