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What a great artist! Edward Lear. (1 Viewer)

deborah4

deborah4

Well-known member
Some of you may be interested in this thread

http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=165396

Apart from wanting to clear up some taxonomic questions about a couple of prints I was given yesterday, I've made a personal big discovery the past 24 hrs, one of my favorite childhood poets, Edward Lear, not only did lovely weird illustrations for his poems/limericks but was also a great ornithological artist on a par with Aubudon, Gould and Selby. I have a big fondness for Victorian natural history illustrators and was particularly pleased to find I now have a couple of 'Lears' to add to my collection! (Well prints anyway ;))

http://www.aradergalleries.com/detail.php?id=1714

http://www.ansp.org/museum/digital_collections/lear/gleanings_gallery_1.php
http://www.ansp.org/museum/digital_collections/lear/parrot_gallery_1.php
 
deborah4 said:
http://www.aradergalleries.com/detail.php?id=1714

http://www.ansp.org/museum/digital_collections/lear/gleanings_gallery_1.php
http://www.ansp.org/museum/digital_collections/lear/parrot_gallery_1.php
Click to expand...


The Academy of Natural Sciences(ansp link above) is just a few blocks away from where I now sit. Shall I go pay a visit for you, Deborah? Actually I get there far less than I should and have let my membership lapse. Maybe when I have more time, which I hope will be soon.

I discovered some of this work by Lear within the last few year, I THINK in 'Art of Ornithology' by Jonathan Elphick. As I recall there was also a beautiful rendering of a Kingfisher by John Ruskin in that book.
 
when I worked on Lord Derbys estate in Knowsley I could see the cottage that he used to live in - he did a lot of his work from the original managerie, pre - safari park....
 
I remember when I first saw his bird paintings I thought 'this guy's got the same name as the poet guy',

Doh!

Mike
 
Interesting that I would find this thread here. I, too, am a fan of Lears work. This last weekend I lucked into two aquatint copperplate etchings of his at a garage sale for a truly embarrasing sum of a buck apiece. It was in researching these that I stumbled upon this forum. The etchings I have are from plates 19 and 20 from Prideaux John Selby's "A Natural History Of Pigeons" and I will treasure them always. If anyone should know where I could find more information on this work I would greatly appreciate it. Specificly, I'm interested in following the history of the plates themselves.
An interesting bit about this remarkable man I've uncovered during my search; many of the works ascribed to Audobon, Selby, Jardine, et al; were actually done by Lear himself. While his dream was to become a well known landscape artist his 'bread and butter' came from naturalist illustration, yet his fame was the result of nonsense poetry!
 
Lots of personal politics to be enjoyed there - didn't John Gould at one point have his wife Elizabeth and Edward Lear doing all the grunt work (artistically speaking ) for him. He JG would rattle out a sketch and tell them to get on with it.
 
ed keeble said:
Lots of personal politics to be enjoyed there - didn't John Gould at one point have his wife Elizabeth and Edward Lear doing all the grunt work (artistically speaking ) for him. He JG would rattle out a sketch and tell them to get on with it.
Click to expand...
Exactly that - he was far to busy courting his patrons for the support required to produce the next couple of folios.
 
I was just reading that the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philadelphia is planning a show of Lear's natural history drawings in 2012. This was in an article about a local scientist, Robert McCracken Peck, who is credited with just finding Audubon's first published drawing.
 
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