The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea – and saw two sails from a boat spread out like vampire wings against a pinky sky and a purple ocean. Nonsense is never far away in the landscape art of Edward Lear. From this tiny watercolour of a scene on the River Nile to an Italian lake with a wraithlike woman in the foreground. In a scribble, he calls her “a Dantesque female” and she seems to have stepped out of a Dalí painting.
Lear, king of the limerick and high priest of Victorian nonsense, was professionally an artist first, an author second. His landscapes totter on the edge of dream and ecstasy. He rivalled John James Audubon as an ornithological painter, which was how he first escaped the genteel poverty of his economically declined middle-class family. But most of all, his art became an excuse and support for a life of constant travel that kept him away from sooty Victorian England and took him all round the shores of the Mediterranean until he finally settled in San Remo on the Italian Riviera.
The Ikon Gallery has put together an exquisite selection of Lear’s quick, immediate sketches and watercolours. It makes for an intimate, warming show. If you haven’t travelled to the Mediterranean recently and can’t see yourself doing so any time soon, it hurts. So many subtle nuances of sun-kissed colours. So many beaches and romantic ruins. Wish you were here?
Ikon is known for contemporary art but, as with its recent exhibition of the Renaissance painter Carlo Crivelli, the bright, clean, minimal white space is weirdly effective. At first the space seems to swallow the art, especially as Lear’s sketches are so small and unimposing. You miss the dark walls and low lighting that might be more natural. Yet as you acclimatise, the setting becomes gloriously ethereal. These pools of captured light float in empty space like exotic planets in a void.
Nineteenth-century British painting declined horribly after the death of JMW Turner in 1851. It became stiff and metallic. What happened to the freedom and atmosphere Turner had whipped up? It only survived in open-air paintings and sketches where artists allowed themselves to be more natural. Even an artist as official as Frederic Leighton did sensual oil sketches on his holidays. But Lear goes further. He catches moments of passing beauty in a way that makes you feel the ephemerality of happiness, the mystery of being.
In a watercolour of a temple at Karnak in Egypt, its dark rectangular form is reflected in silvery water and mystically balanced by the bright moon. And then that’s reflected too, so the two sublime rectangles symmetrically accompany two circular moons. It gets more impossible, the longer you think about it. You can picture the Owl and the Pussycat dancing here by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon.
But this far from straightforward landscape was done extremely quickly. Lear recorded the time and date: 9.30pm, 22 January 1867. It is framed with another watercolour done at Karnak just half an hour later, at 10pm the same night. So these are not to be looked at as sombre masterpieces composed in long studio sessions; they are snapshots, rapid responses to sights that strike Lear like sudden shafts of sun – or moonlight.
At one point I found myself dashing round the gallery, getting deliberately brief glimpses of Lear’s rhapsodic souvenirs of places the captions call Ootacamund, Calvi, Egina. Seeing these pictures pass at speed, like glimpses from a train window, helps understand them. For Lear’s subject is not place. It’s travel itself, the intoxicating sense of being free and out of place, a stranger in paradise, moving on before you become too attached.
Whatever made him want to escape Britain, eventually dying alone at his villa in San Remo in 1888, he is a great artist of the impulse to get up and go. Travel is life and love in his delirious art. He makes you want to find yourself a pea-green boat.
• Edward Lear: Moment to Moment is at Ikon, Birmingham, until 13 November.
