5^TH FEB 2012                                                                                                                       

Seline Bullocke

Edward Lear and Ideals of Art Theory in the Development of English Landscape Painting

Edward Lear (1812-88) was born on 12 or possibly 13 May 1812, the twentieth of twenty-one children.

Seline Bullock reflects on his life and art, to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth

Combine a lumbering, sincere, twinkly-eyed fellow, possessed of a curious fragility that is the pairing of a sensitive soul and an unforgiving constitution, with a robust artistic motivation and a keen sense of the absurd, and we would be confronted with the diligent vagabond that is Edward Lear, one of the most talented eccentrics of the nineteenth century. The subject of this essay will be just one of these talents, Lear’s core ambition, landscape painting, the occupation that motivated him beyond all else, propelling him through extremes of sickness, misfortune and intense physical discomfort, to become an exceptional painter of the natural world.

In order better to understand the path of Lear’s career, it is important to acknowledge Lear’s professional heritage, namely, the genre of English landscape painting in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, to which Lear’s success as a painter was inextricably linked, through factors as varied as high academia and societal faddishness. In establishing the external context of Lear’s profession and his position within the genre, it is also appropriate to understand the internal context of the artist himself, who would readily acknowledge his admiration for others of a similar craft, and with these idols in mind, worked prolifically towards the achievement of his personal aspirations.

The manifestation of truth, beauty and ultimately ‘authenticity’ in Art was the cause of much debate in eighteenth-century England, with particular regard to the depiction of the natural world, which had yet to become legitimised among English academics and contemporary society, as a genre in its own right. This seems improbable when one considers the strength of the tradition of Landscape painting by Dutch, Flemish and French artists of the previous century. Yet, in conjunction with the question of whether the study of nature was worthy of serious attention, there had been much conjecture as to the manner and process of that study, the mode of depiction and the relevance of ‘detail’, or rather, its absence.

A significant voice in this debate was that of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), whom George III appointed as President of the Royal Academy upon its formation in 1768. Reynolds was not only an eminent portrait painter: Reynolds was also an academic with specific theoretical ideals, which were incorporated into the Royal Academy curriculum during his twenty-four years as President, and survived his death to inform the critical debate for decades, so that even Edward Lear was touched by the rigour of Reynolds’ theoretical ambitions.

According to Reynolds, study of the natural world should be conducted directly through the study of the representations of nature by classical masters, such as Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (1602-82)[i] and that ‘nature herself is not to be too closely copied’[ii], for the fear of observing innate imperfections, which would surely not bear scrutiny[iii]. Thus any possibility of the idealized aesthetic, which Reynolds named the ‘great style’[iv] would be negated, and its crude product rendered incapable of contributing successfully, to high-minded cultural progress in England. Generalised depictions of nature were favourable, for ‘the whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.’[v] Indeed, Reynolds went so far as to warn his students, ‘A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great; can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.’[vi] These were exacting ideals, entirely removed from direct interaction with the outside world, spoken by one of the most respected practitioners of the time, praised even decades later by those who acknowledged the influence of Reynolds’ teachings[vii], without adhering to them strictly, such as John Constable (1776-1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)[viii].

In 1843, while Lear was living in Rome aged thirty-one, the bright young John Ruskin (1819-1900), aged twenty-four, wrote, ‘no picture can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true’.[ix]

Lear admired the teachings of Ruskin, who advocated working directly and attentively from nature. This was Lear’s greatest passion and essential to his artistic practice, evidenced as early as eighteen years old when Lear was commissioned by the Zoological Society to make detailed sketches of the parrots at Regent’s Park Zoo, culminating in the lithographic volume, Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae[x].

Ruskin’s admiration and support of Turner is well documented; that he was also an avid collector of Turner’s works is unsurprising[xi]. Lear found inspiration not only in the paintings of Turner but naturally also of Claude, appearing to fall in somewhat with Reynolds’ concerns, until, Levi notes, ‘It was topographical exactness that turned him away from Claude… It was truth that set him against Poussin and Salvator Rosa.’[xii]

Ultimately Lear wanted to convey the unique particularities of a landscape with lyrical precision, rather than mere ‘imitation’, or an imagined perfection, leading him further from the idealization of Claude, whose work embodied the latter aesthetic mode. Yet Lear should be credited for his skillful depictions of the inherent drama of natural surroundings, without resorting to painterly melodrama or abstraction; the absence of these characteristics does not qualify his work as poetically underwhelming; it is accurate to say that Lear was a topographical artist, yet his topographies are lyrical. As a painter who regularly reflected on his own practice, he shared aesthetic sentiments with heroes of the English Romantics, such as Constable, to whom Lear makes no reference[xiii], who wrote, ‘that landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition, neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids’.[xiv] The parallel to Lear’s uncompromising, ‘to stop in a sky is to spoil all’.[xv]

Throughout Lear’s life, Turner’s masterly handling of light through the medium of paint, continued to inspire and to an extent, inform Lear’s own practice, although he modestly acknowledged his own limitations. That Lear was an expert colourist is certain; despite his imperfect eyesight, his manifestations of nature’s tonal nuances are most delicately observed and are another unifying characteristic of Lear’s paintings, for they are not simply balanced against each other but exist harmoniously with the forms within the panorama depicted. This is an important factor in the contradiction of Reynolds’ notion that nature can and should be improved upon by the artist’s idealized interpretation, and in addition to the highly respected Ruskin, was also contested by the French critic and poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), who wrote in 1846 that tonal errors simply do not exist in the natural world, since, ‘Chemical affinities are the grounds whereby Nature cannot make mistakes in the arrangement of her tones… for with Nature, form and colour are one.’[xvi]

Lear’s brief experience at The Royal Academy, beginning in 1850 and ending within months[xvii], brought him in contact with the thorn in the side of Reynolds’s approach, which rose shockingly from within the institution. Dissenting voices in the form of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a close group of talented students, to Lear the most significant of whom was William Holman Hunt, directly opposed the omission of detail and creative generalization. Lear was excited by the boldness of the Brotherhood who outraged the critics with evidence of their alternative views and identified with their assertion that a direct and highly attentive communion with nature was essential to truthful artistic practice.

Inspired by the Brotherhood’s energy and lacking in confidence as to his own handling of oils, a charming friendship developed between the two artists, who subsequently lived together for several weeks in Sussex so that Hunt would learn Italian from Lear, who would in turn learn from Hunt, how to handle oils[xviii]. Lear was the jubilant recipient of Holman Hunt’s guidance although according to Peter Levi, it seems that his reliance on Hunt’s advice was in fact rather damaging to the oblivious Lear, who would studiously record Hunt’s tutelage in ‘Ye Booke of Hunte’ and as a result, began using incongruous tones in his paintings according to his young tutor’s influence[xix].

Despite Reynolds’ assistance with the social elevation of artists, and the increasing self-reflection of artists on their own methods, English painters were not necessarily respected by their countrymen abroad; on Lear’s visit to Calabria it was a disgusted young Englishman who referred to him as, ‘ “nothing but a damned, dirty landscape painter” ‘[xx]. This insult, which Lear cheerfully adopted as his sobriquet, highlighted the fine line that existed in the broad perceptions of society, of what it meant to be a landscape artist. On the one hand, Lear was flattered to be identified with the artistic purpose, which he sought and worked at so diligently, on the other, such a statement showed a sheer disrespect towards his profession.

‘I am very glad I took to Landscape – it suits my taste so exactly,’[xxi] wrote Lear in 1841. For Lear, landscape was liberation in every sense. The comparative warmth of months spent in Mediterranean climates seeped continually into his bones, loosening the tight bronchitis in his chest, which invariably appeared at each drop in temperature, in London. The long days of clear bright light allowed him to rise early and work late, to go for long walks over rugged terrain, exercising his fragile constitution, so as to somewhat avert the inevitable and often daily attacks of epilepsy, from which he suffered all his life. Apart from the significant improvement in his physical health there must also have been the psychological relief of rolling open spaces, evoking in the artist a strong sense of freedom, clarity and perspective, both actual in the external world and felt inwardly also – the antidote to claustrophobic social engagements, of which there were multiple, and stifling performances as Lear the entertaining English eccentric. Lear perhaps loved and loathed these in equal measure, as such occasions although jovial, served only to amplify his melancholic loneliness.

Nineteenth-century rural Corfu was a delight to Lear’s senses: the wide expanse of bright, clear Greek sky, sweeping across craggy, winding tracks and out to the horizon, punctuated by the imposing shore of Albania, its vast mountains, snow-laden, rising up against the Ionian Sea. From high points in the landscape, Lear would have been able to see large tracts of untouched headland, uninhabited by industrial man and covered in the crickets and ‘leafy thickets’ which would appear later in Incidents in The Life of My Uncle Arly[xxii]. Away from the bustling town, the cacophonous chirruping of cicadas and other, feathered creatures, the dull tinkle of goat bells on the hillsides and the rustling of crisp leaves in the olive groves would break the silence he so cherished[xxiii].

Although Lear’s works are certainly faithful in their representation, their intrinsic vitality prevents them from becoming banal imitations of the artist’s surroundings, and instead convey the tangible senses of heat, light, texture and optical depth with every glittering sea, or ragged hilltop that we experience through his eyes. Indeed, there are some views he would paint repeatedly from his delight of the aspect, such as Corfu: A View from Above the Village of Ascension, which Lear described as, ‘a wonderful thing, & when, on the fête day, all the ground is covered with gaiety & costume, nothing can exceed its beauty’.[xxiv]

It is clear that the artist felt compelled by the beauty of the natural landscape and truthfulness in Lear is evidenced not least by historical accuracy, which is a fundamental characteristic of the drawings and paintings. Many of these exist as pre-photographic records of the places he visited, and reflect the Victorian preoccupation with ordering and categorizing, which blended well with Lear’s own meticulous nature. It was common for Lear’s patrons to give commissions for views from his forthcoming travels, in the knowledge that the returning document would be both enthralling and accurate. Yet Lear, the sensitive and emotional artist that he was, would steadfastly follow his own creative will, in terms of the selection of views from which to paint, instead of calculating a purely commercial outcome, and thus remained additionally truthful to his aesthetic. These traits combined in such a way as to convey landscape with genuine emotion, to describe scenes that were moving, inspiring, even breath-taking and still retain their precision; Angus Davidson, one of Lear’s early biographers, writes, ‘he was creating, not copying: the “topographical landscape-painter” – in spite of himself, and perhaps without knowing it – had been defeated, to his own salvation, by the artist’.[xxv]

The characteristic of the sketch adds a further dimension to the sense of authenticity in Edward Lear’s work, although the sketches were far from prized during his lifetime. Many served as compositional guides for later commissions, which would be developed in the studio; annotations denoting such accuracies as the type of light, the time of day, the precise shade of colour and any proportional adjustments to be made, were commonly written in pencil by Lear over the drawing. Indeed, Ruskin encouraged such annotations, writing in his letters to aspiring artists entitled The Elements of Drawing, ‘You will find it of great use, whatever kind of landscape scenery you are passing through, to get into the habit of making memoranda of the shapes of shadows.’[xxvi]

In today’s academic assessment, the mode of the ‘sketch’ is afforded equal, if not at times greater, importance in the demonstration of an artist’s original intentions, though unfortunately, as Katharine Baetjer writes, ‘Lear’s own contemporaries would have found them less satisfying and regarded them simply as rough designs from which to commission something much more complete and highly wrought.’[xxvii]

The photographic characteristics of Lear’s drawings and paintings are most evident in sweeping panoramas of romantic landscapes, representing the Ionian Islands’ untouched idyll. The engravings aptly illustrate textural depth and variation, with precision that is intrinsically accentuated by the medium, whether it be the imposing mountainous landscape of Castel Sant Angelo, Corfu or the delicately rendered trees of Town and Harbour of Caïo, Paxo. The degree of detail reflects to an extent, the same premise espoused by the Brotherhood and by Ruskin who was of the opinion that ‘there may be as much greatness of mind, as much nobility of manner, in a master’s treatment of the smallest features, as in his management of the most vast’.[xxviii]

Committed as Lear was to his craft, increasing technological photographic developments naturally added the facet of competition between the professions of artist and photographer, where representations of natural landscape were concerned. Topographical artists may have been initially unaffected by these changes, as Ian Jeffrey writes, ‘Despite a rush of technical improvements in the early 1850s… photographers were forced to improvise to gain anything of the naturalism achieved in lithographs.’[xxix] Even so, the medium had given rise to photographers intent on capturing topography just as the artists had done, and while Lear was devoted to wandering across exotic plains with his antiquated sketching materials, photographers such as Francis Frith were already taking pictures in Egypt and Palestine as early as 1857[xxx]. Writing of Henry Peach Robinson’s attempts to harmonise the practices of art and photography in the 1860s, Jeffrey notes that ‘it was a period of bourgeois art patronage in which painters and photographers aimed to please the same fashion-conscious audience’.[xxxi]

Of course, these monochrome machine-made images, while popular and fascinating, may have been incapable of evoking emotion equal to hand-coloured sketches and paintings of the same subject; the mind is intrinsically responsive towards harmonious juxtapositions within the colour spectrum, through which elements of texture and detail are enhanced. Photography’s growing ubiquity notwithstanding, it is a relief to know that Lear did not himself feel threatened as a topographical artist, perhaps for these reasons, and even considered employing the medium to document his own work, although it seems this notion developed no further[xxxii].

Contrary to the academic and practical progression of the genre of landscape painting, as late as 1875 the debate about the aesthetic truthfulness of art still raged without consensus. Addressing London’s St Martin’s School of Art, Sir E.J. Poynter reiterated Reynolds’ concerns accurately with the statement, ‘It is the business of the artist to select what is beautiful and reject what is ugly and unsuitable.’[xxxiii]

In the context of this opinion, it is perhaps unsurprising that Poynter ascended to the post of President of the Royal Academy in 1896, a little more than one hundred years after Reynolds’ death, and following the brief occupancy of the same position by one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Sir John Everett Millais.

Despite living a geographically peripheral life, Lear was inextricably affected by the contemporary shifts in mood, which in turn accorded to changes in commercial aesthetic demands. While he may not have been aware of the full extent of the art-theoretical debate, his knowledge of it may have been based upon observing which of his works, he felt, were surprisingly slow to sell, such as The Cedars of Lebanon. This painting was priced far too highly from the outset, by Lear, hubristically convinced of its superior merits, in relation to the work of acclaimed painters, such as Millais who at this time was selling successfully[xxxiv]. Already encumbered with the misfortune of poor health and his persisting financial concerns, the peculiar hardship of societal trend was particularly tiresome for Lear to bear, although it seems that to a certain extent he grew accustomed to it, all the while hoping and expecting that it might, one day, change.

Fortunately, Lear’s circle of friendship mingled with patronage was wide, yet although these followers were devoted, his credibility as a painter seemed not to advance beyond this boundary during his lifetime. Landscapes were still viewed by many as only subordinate or even incidental additions to important central subjects, such as grand historical depictions and lofty portraits. In pursuit of this passion he resolutely followed his own artistic will, despite the good fortune that might have followed, had he been willing to bend his talent towards more commercial paintings which reflected the trend. As Jeremy Maas so accurately writes, ‘In an age which demanded of its most celebrated painters that they should regularly deliver large and important subject pictures, preferably of a highly engravable nature, Lear, as a landscapist fell lamentably short. No Scapegoats, no Derby Days, no Ophelias from his brush, only strange scenes in God-forsaken places which tolled the death knell of public celebrity’[xxxv].

Lear was the fortunate inheritor of an increasingly enlightened appreciation for the accurate depictions of foreign lands and yet the popular understanding of the aesthetic value of topographical art was incomplete. Michael Rosenthal says of Turner, ‘The audiences for art, the readerships for criticism, metropolitan and provincial, were grouped according to sex, class, and politics. Society was not homogenous enough for Turner to be able to communicate to the public at large.’[xxxvi] Although this comment is specific to Turner’s sense of abstraction and ethereality in nature, the broader consequences of a culturally rigid and uneducated populace can be extended understandably to Lear’s own experience.

Throughout his life, Edward Lear felt like something of an outsider and yet, by following his own intuitive practice, his extensive works indicate a communion with some of the highest theoretical ideals of his day. It is a great shame that the public acknowledgement he so desperately sought during his life, was never awarded to him for his work as an artist. However, two hundred years after his birth, the understated elegance of Lear’s landscapes is at last understood; the energy and immediacy of Lear’s sketches have deservedly grown to be recognised as brilliant; in this respect the artist was ahead of his time and so much enriched the genre of nineteenth-century landscape painting, whether it acknowledged him or not. Fortunately, Lear himself had sufficient foresight to perceive the worth of his discipline, writing in Corfu on 20 July 1856, ‘Strange that what to me is always painful & disagreeable work – painting – should in a couple of months create a work which not only gives pleasure to its possessor at present but may continue to do so to hundreds of others for a century or more.’[xxxvii]

How right he was.

‘© Seline Bullocke Arttext’

Selected Bibliography

Biographies, Diaries, Nonsense

Angus Davidson, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet, 1812-1888. (Penguin Books, 1950).

Holbrook Jackson, editor. The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear. (Faber & Faber, 2001).

Peter Levi, Edward Lear: A Biography. (Papermac, 1996).

Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer. (Sutton Publishing, 2006).

Ian Ousby, editor.  The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Philip Sherrard, editor.  Edward Lear, The Corfu Years: A Chronicle Presented Through His Letters and Journals. (Denise Harvey & Company, 1988).

Exhibition Catalogues

British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art, 1750-1950. Edited by Robert Hoozee. (Mercatorfonds, 2007).

Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape. Martin Sonnabend and Jon Whiteley with Christian Rümelin. (Ashmolean Museum, 2011).

Edward Lear: 1812-1888, at the Royal Academy of Arts. Foreword by Roger De Grey, Introduction by Vivien Noakes, essays by Sir Steven Runciman and Jeremy Maas. (Royal Academy of Arts, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985).

Glorious Nature: British Landscape Painting, 1750-1850. Catalogue by Katharine Baetjer, essays by Michael Rosenthal, Kathleen Nicholson, Richard Quaintance, Stephen Daniels, Timothy J. Standring. Edited by Paul Anbinder. (Zwemmer, 1993).

Anthologies

Art in Theory 1648-1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger. (Blackwell Publishing, 2000).

Art in Theory 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas.  Edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger. (Blackwell Publishing, 1998).

Related Works

Heather Birchall, Pre-Raphaelites. (Taschen, 2010).

Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner. (Yale University Press, 1977).

Philip Hofer, Edward Lear as a Landscape Draughtsman. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967).

John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. (Thames & Hudson, 2011).

Ian Jeffrey, Photography: A Concise History. (Thames & Hudson, 1989).

Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century. (Yale University Press, 1997).

Joshua Reynolds, Seven Discourses on Art. (General Books, 2010).

John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing. (Dover Publications, 1971).

John Sunderland, Painting in Britain: 1525 to 1975. (Phaidon, 1976).

Christopher Wright, Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné. (Harlequin Books, 1985).