Edward lear brief biography of mark

Edward Lear (1812–1888) was an English artist, poet, and author, best known for his literary nonsense, particularly his limericks. Born into a large family in North London, Lear was the youngest of 21 children. Financial hardships meant he was raised by his elder sister, Ann, who became a mother figure to him.

Lear began his career as an ornithological artist, working for the Zoological Society and creating illustrations of birds for prominent figures like the Earl of Derby. His first major publication, Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, was released when he was just 19. However, due to deteriorating eyesight, Lear transitioned from bird illustration to landscape painting, producing vibrant watercolours during his extensive travels to countries like Italy, Greece, Egypt, and India.

Beyond his visual art, Lear is celebrated for his whimsical literary works, which include collections of poetry, short stories, and songs. His nonsense poems, including “The Owl and the Pussycat,” remain widely loved. Lear also pursued his ambition to illustrate Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poems, with a volume published near the end of his life.

Lear’s travels and experiences in Italy, particularly in regions like Calabria, inspired many of his landscape sketches and travel journals. Despite his later years being marked by illness, he continued to paint and write, leaving behind a legacy as a pioneering artist and beloved writer. He died in 1888 in Italy.

May 12, 2012, the bicentennial of the birth of the English artist, illustrator, and author Edward Lear, was celebrated in certain quarters as International Owl and the Pussycat Day. Lear began to create his nonsense verses, limericks, illustrated alphabets, and whimsical drawings early in life and didn't imagine they would interest anyone beyond his family and friends. When he published the first of them, in 1846, he did so pseudonymously so as not to harm his reputation as a serious artist. He wrote and illustrated "The Owl and the Pussycat" in 1867 to cheer a sick child. Lear's beloved poem may be read online today in more than 100 languages, although translating the nonsense word "runcible" into Hawaiian or Hebrew may have been a challenge.

The Natural History of Edward Lear,an exhibition at Harvard's Houghton Library through August 18, celebrates a different aspect of Lear's career to mark his bicentennial. The library holds the largest and most complete collection in the world of his original artwork and related material—more than 4,000 items—and this exhibition presents a selection of his sketches, studies, and finished paintings of parrots and other subjects of natural history. Robert McCracken Peck, senior fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, was guest curator for the exhibition and wrote a substantial essay, "The Natural History of Edward Lear," for a double issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin (volume 22, numbers 2-3), which contains as well an essay by Hope Mayo, Hofer curator of printing and graphic arts, about the Lear collection, and a catalog of the exhibition.

"Although he is best remembered today as a whimsical nonsense poet, adventurous traveler, and painter of luminous landscapes," Peck writes, "Edward Lear is revered in scientific circles as one of the greatest natural history painters of all time. During his relatively brief immersion in the world of science, he created a spectacular monogra

5 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

Although accomplished and successful, Lear's life was marked by much unhappiness. The bad times started early on. Lear was the 20th of 21 children. His father was a stockbroker but when the boy Lear was four his father went bankrupt and - like Charles Dickens's father - seems to have ended up in a debtor's prison.

At the time the young Lear left his parents' home with his eldest sister, Ann, who was 21 years older than him.

"Ever since he was a child he had fits of depression," says Donaldson.

One day when Lear was around seven years old, his father took him to a field near Highgate in north London. He saw some clowns, and a band playing. Afterwards he went home and cried "half the night" - as he recollected years later.

Donaldson says "he realised, at an early age, that happiness and beauty were transient".

Lear's own word for it was "morbidness" and it may explain what Donaldson calls "that mixture of happiness and sadness in his work".

In Lear you find humour but also pathos. "Creatures such as the Dong with the Luminous Nose and the little birds in the poem, Callico Pie, that never come back. There is a kind of sadness mixed in with the humour, which is very appealing," says Donaldson.

In The Owl and Pussycat, however, pathos is held at bay, just.

Of her sequel, Donaldson says: "I cannot tell you everything but they go off in search of that very ring that they got married with - it gets stolen right at the beginning of my story by a crow - and they sail away in a beautiful blue balloon."

Surely Lear would have approved.

<italic>Julia Donaldson spoke to </italic> <link> <caption>Newshour </caption> <url href="http://www.bbcworldservice.com/newshour" platform="highweb"/> </link> <italic>on the BBC World Service.</italic>