Edward Lear was born on May 12, 1812, in Halloway, London, United Kingdom. He was the 20th child of a prosperous stockbroker, and brought up by an older sister Ann.
His childhood was passed in a comfortable home in Highgate. When Edward was 15 years old, he and his sister had settled in a separate house.
He lacked formal training, but his interest and energy made him a skilled draftsman. Because of his epilepsy and asthma, he was educated by his sisters Anne and Sarah. They introduced him to sketching and coloring.
From the age of 15 to 18, he helped support himself by drawings made for doctors and hospitals. A friend got him a commission from the Zoological Society to draw the birds in the London zoo. The 42 hand-colored lithographs of his book The Family of Psittacidae or Parrots have been compared favorably to the drawings of J. J. Audubon. While working at the zoo, Lear was invited by Lord Derby to make drawings of the menagerie on his estate of Knowsley.
In the 4 years he spent there, he became a favorite with the grandchildren. For them he created his first Nonsense Book, a collection of 50 limericks illustrated with delightful nonsense drawings. Trips to northern England at this time woke a desire to paint romantic landscape, especially because close drawing injured his sight.
He resolved to go to Rome, where he hoped to sell his watercolors to English residents. Until 1848 Rome remained his center of activity from which he made trips about Europe, Asia, and Africa in search of subject matter for his landscapes.
He accepted an invitation from Holman Hunt to exchange lessons in Italian for help in oil painting. The relationship was fruitful. Hunt became "Daddy Hunt," an artistic support to the older, lonely man.
He did a number of oil landscapes between 1840 and 1853 and exhibited the most ambitious of these at the Royal Academy from 1850 to 1853. They did not sell at the price he asked, so he returned to the smaller watercolors and the lithographs for his travel books. Living much in hotels, Lear met the children for whom he wrote the poems and prose and drew the illustrations that were published at intervals from 1846 to 1877.
For casually met child friends he created the inimitable "Owl and the Pussy Cat," "The Pobble's Toes," "The Jumblies," and others.
For the last 14 years of his life Lear lived in a home he had built at San Remo in Italy. He died there on January 29, 1888.
He is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems.
Capercaillie or Cock of the Wood
Self-portrait
Psittacula taranta. Abyssinian parrakeet (Abyssinian Lovebird)
A distant view of the Citadel, Corfu
Lithography of Melfi
Study of palm trees
Nonsense
The Owl and the Pussycat
Bagnara Calabra
Nuneham
Psitteuteles versicolor
Masada on the Dead Sea
St. Hospice
A view of Santa Maura, Levkas, Ionian Islands
A Book of Nonsense
Santa Maria Della Salute from across the Bacino, Venice
The Upper Nile, Toske, Egypt
Macrocercus aracanga (Ara macao)
The Dead Sea, Jordan
Psittacula kuhlii (Kuhl's Lorikeets)
Kinchinjunga from Darjeeling, Himalayas
Civita Castellana
Eretria, Euboea, Greece
Terrapene clausa
Testudo tabulata (Chelonoidis denticulata)
Howatke
A view of the Qutb Minar, Delhi
The Letter C of the Alphabet
Villefranche
Petra
The Pyramids Road, Gizah
Quotations:
"There was an old man with a beard, who said: 'It is just as I feared! Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren have all built their nests in my beard."
"A vile beastly rottenheaded foolbegotten brazenthroated pernicous piggish screaming, tearing, roaring, perplexing, splitmecrackle crashmecriggle insane ass of a woman is practising howling below-stairs with a brute of a singingmaster so horribly, that my head is nearly off."
"I am almost thanking God that I was never educated, for it seems to me that 999 of those who are so, expensively and laboriously, have lost all before they arrive at my age-& remain like Swift's Stulbruggs-cut and dry for life, making no use of their earlier-gained treasures:-whereas, I seem to be on the threshold of knowledge."
"It takes a long time to make a painter - even with a good artist's education - but without one it tries the patience of Job; it is a great thing if one does not go backward."
Lear was a closeted gay man. His most fervent and painful friendship was with Franklin Lushington. He met the young barrister in Malta in 1849 and then toured southern Greece with him.
The closest he came to marriage was two proposals, both to the same woman 46 years his junior, which were not accepted.
