No More Learning

He
was a man of striking nobility of nature, fearless, independent, energetic,
given to forming for himself strong opinions, often hastily, sometimes
bitterly; not always strong or sound in judgment, but always seeking after
truth in every matter, and following it as he understood it in scorn of
consequence; utterly unselfish, devoted to his friends, generous even to
extravagance towards any one who had ever been connected with his fortunes
or his travels; playful, light-hearted, witty, and humorous, but not
without those occasional fits of black depression and nervous irritability
to which such temperaments are liable.

Great and varied as the merits of his pictures are, Lear hardly succeeded
in achieving any great popularity as a landscape-painter. His work was
frequently done on private commission, and he rarely sent in pictures for
the Academy or other exhibitions. His larger and more highly finished
landscapes were unequal in technical perfection,--sometimes harsh or cold
in color, or stiff in composition; sometimes full of imagination, at others
literal and prosaic,--but always impressive reproductions of interesting or
peculiar scenery. In later years he used in conversation to qualify himself
as a "topographical artist;" and the definition was true, though not
exhaustive. He had an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the
character and beauty of distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky
gorges, the majesty of a single mountain rising from a base of plain or
sea; and he was equally exact in rendering the true forms of the middle
distances and the specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various
lands through which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures
show a mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of
painting an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away
from the eye of the spectator until it is lost in a dim horizon. Sir
Roderick Murchison used to say that he always understood the geological
peculiarities of a country he had only studied in Lear's sketches. The
compliment was thoroughly justified; and it is not every landscape-painter
to whom it could honestly be paid.

The history of Lear's choice of a career was a curious one. He was the
youngest of twenty-one children, and, through a family mischance, was
thrown entirely on the limited resources of an elderly sister at a very
early age. As a boy he had always dabbled in colors for his own amusement,
and had been given to poring over the ordinary boys' books upon natural
history. It occurred to him to try to turn his infant talents to account;
and he painted upon cardboard a couple of birds in the style which the
older among us remember as having been called Oriental tinting, took them
to a small shop, and sold them for fourpence. The kindness of friends, to
whom he was ever grateful, gave him the opportunity of more serious and
more remunerative study, and he became a patient and accurate zoological
draughtsman. Many of the birds in the earlier volumes of Gould's
magnificent folios were drawn for him by Lear.
A few years back there were
eagles alive in the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park to which Lear could
point as old familiar friends that he had drawn laboriously from claw to
beak fifty years before. He united with this kind of work the more
unpleasant occupation of drawing the curiosities of disease or deformity in
hospitals. One day, as he was busily intent on the portrait of a bird in
the Zoological Gardens, an old gentleman came and looked over his shoulder,
entered into conversation, and finally said to him, "You must come and draw
my birds at Knowsley. " Lear did not know where Knowsley was, or what it
meant; but the old gentleman was the thirteenth Earl of Derby. The
successive Earls of Derby have been among Lear's kindest and most generous
patrons. He went to Knowsley, and the drawings in the "Knowsley Menagerie"
(now a rare and highly-prized work among book collectors) are by Lear's
hand. At Knowsley he became a permanent favorite; and it was there that he
composed in prolific succession his charming and wonderful series of
utterly nonsensical rhymes and drawings. Lear had already begun seriously
to study landscape. When English winters began to threaten his health, Lord
Derby started a subscription which enabled him to go to Rome as a student
and artist, and no doubt gave him recommendations among Anglo-Roman
society which laid the foundations of a numerous _clientele_. It was in the
Roman summers that Lear first began to exercise the taste for pictorial
wandering which grew into a habit and a passion, to fill vivid and copious
note-books as he went, and to illustrate them by spirited and accurate
drawings; and his first volume of "Illustrated Excursions in Italy,"
published in 1846, is gratefully dedicated to his Knowsley patron.

Only those who have travelled with him could know what a delightful comrade
he was to men whose tastes ran more or less parallel to his own. It was not
everybody who could travel with him; for he was so irrepressibly anxious
not to lose a moment of the time at his disposal for gathering into his
garners the beauty and interest of the lands over which he journeyed, that
he was careless of comfort and health. Calabria, Sicily, the Desert of
Sinai, Egypt and Nubia, Greece and Albania, Palestine, Syria, Athos,
Candia, Montenegro, Zagori (who knows now where Zagori is, or was? ), were
as thoroughly explored and sketched by him as the more civilized localities
of Malta, Corsica, and Corfu. He read insatiably before starting all the
recognized guide-books and histories of the country he intended to draw;
and his published itineraries are marked by great strength and literary
interest quite irrespectively of the illustrations. And he had his reward.