Nonsense Books | Page 2

fortunes or his travels; playful, light-hearted, witty, and humorous, but
not without those occasional fits of black depression and nervous
irritability to which such temperaments are liable.
Great and varied as the merits of his pictures are, Lear hardly

succeeded in achieving any great popularity as a landscape-painter. His
work was frequently done on private commission, and he rarely sent in
pictures for the Academy or other exhibitions. His larger and more
highly finished landscapes were unequal in technical
perfection,--sometimes harsh or cold in color, or stiff in composition;
sometimes full of imagination, at others literal and prosaic,--but always
impressive reproductions of interesting or peculiar scenery. In later
years he used in conversation to qualify himself as a "topographical
artist;" and the definition was true, though not exhaustive. He had an
intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the character and beauty of
distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky gorges, the majesty of a
single mountain rising from a base of plain or sea; and he was equally
exact in rendering the true forms of the middle distances and the
specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various lands through
which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures show a
mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of painting
an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away from
the eye of the spectator until it is lost in a dim horizon. Sir Roderick
Murchison used to say that he always understood the geological
peculiarities of a country he had only studied in Lear's sketches. The
compliment was thoroughly justified; and it is not every
landscape-painter to whom it could honestly be paid.
The history of Lear's choice of a career was a curious one. He was the
youngest of twenty-one children, and, through a family mischance, was
thrown entirely on the limited resources of an elderly sister at a very
early age. As a boy he had always dabbled in colors for his own
amusement, and had been given to poring over the ordinary boys' books
upon natural history. It occurred to him to try to turn his infant talents
to account; and he painted upon cardboard a couple of birds in the style
which the older among us remember as having been called Oriental
tinting, took them to a small shop, and sold them for fourpence. The
kindness of friends, to whom he was ever grateful, gave him the
opportunity of more serious and more remunerative study, and he
became a patient and accurate zoölogical draughtsman. Many of the
birds in the earlier volumes of Gould's magnificent folios were drawn
for him by Lear. A few years back there were eagles alive in the
Zoölogical Gardens in Regent's Park to which Lear could point as old

familiar friends that he had drawn laboriously from claw to beak fifty
years before. He united with this kind of work the more unpleasant
occupation of drawing the curiosities of disease or deformity in
hospitals. One day, as he was busily intent on the portrait of a bird in
the Zoölogical Gardens, an old gentleman came and looked over his
shoulder, entered into conversation, and finally said to him, "You must
come and draw my birds at Knowsley." Lear did not know where
Knowsley was, or what it meant; but the old gentleman was the
thirteenth Earl of Derby. The successive Earls of Derby have been
among Lear's kindest and most generous patrons. He went to Knowsley,
and the drawings in the "Knowsley Menagerie" (now a rare and
highly-prized work among book collectors) are by Lear's hand. At
Knowsley he became a permanent favorite; and it was there that he
composed in prolific succession his charming and wonderful series of
utterly nonsensical rhymes and drawings. Lear had already begun
seriously to study landscape. When English winters began to threaten
his health, Lord Derby started a subscription which enabled him to go
to Rome as a student and artist, and no doubt gave him
recommendations among Anglo-Roman society which laid the
foundations of a numerous _clientèle_. It was in the Roman summers
that Lear first began to exercise the taste for pictorial wandering which
grew into a habit and a passion, to fill vivid and copious note-books as
he went, and to illustrate them by spirited and accurate drawings; and
his first volume of "Illustrated Excursions in Italy," published in 1846,
is gratefully dedicated to his Knowsley patron.
Only those who have travelled with him could know what a delightful
comrade he was to men whose tastes ran more or less parallel to his
own. It was not everybody who could travel with him; for he was so
irrepressibly anxious not to lose a moment of the time at his disposal
for gathering into his garners the