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.
