Traveling back in time with Edward Lear

Despite a thousand reasons to stay home—including bouts of epilepsy, asthma, poor eyesight and chronic depression—British artist Edward Lear still managed to make a living traveling around the world and recording what he saw. Painting in the 19th Century, at a time when Western interest in tourism was expanding, Lear was able to captivate his audience by providing a first glimpse into the lands of the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia.

Experiencing these same works now, currently on display at the Yale Center for British Art (BAC), one realizes that the novelty behind these so-called "new and foreign" lands has dwindled somewhat with the discrediting of Eurocentrism. Yet this is not meant to dismiss the value of Lear's work. Rather, it points to what someone might gain through an exploration of the gallery's current "Edward Lear and the Art of Travel" exhibition: an insight into the attitudes and artistic styles of British culture in the 19th Century.

Art

Edward Lear and the Art of Travel Yale Center for British Art Through Jan. 14 Tues. to Sat. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sun., noon to 5 p.m. Closed Mondays

Lear, best known for his limericks and nonsensical verses in books like The Owl and the Pussycat, also proves himself to be an excellent landscape painter, letting his works to catch the beauty of each new place he experienced. On the rare occasion that Lear somehow finds no natural beauty worth recording—such as in Suez, where he claims the landscape is "without interest at all"—he still manages to find something to record. In this case, he documents the Suez area through his whimscial sketches of camels.

Among the multitude of pen and ink sketches is the focal point of the exhibition; Lear's huge oil painting Kinchinjunga from Darjeeling, a mountain scene based on a location Lear visited in India in 1873. Unlike much of Lear's work, this painting was not created on site, but rather in his studio several years later. The wait perhaps allowed Lear to escape from his usual concern over lighting conditions and other impressionistic worries, letting him focus more on the beauty of the actual landscape, rendering the scene in complete daylight. The inclusion of a Buddhist shrine and a group of people gathered in front of the vast, mountainous backdrop reminds us again that Lear's landscapes are, on a fundamental level, about exploring new lands.

Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art 'The Hypostyle Hall of the Great Temple of Abu Simbel,' by Edward Lear.

Although not the exhibit's focus, Lear's more lighthearted illustrations, created to complement silly verse written for children, constitute some of his most entertaining works. Among the manuscripts of Lear's verse is the original Alphabet, a humorous version of a book teaching kids to read.

Complementing the Lear works, which the exhibition positions chronologically and geographically to show the artist's development, is the other half of the exhibit—works by other British artists of the same time period whose work was also based on travels to foreign countries. The theme of British travel art begins with works from the late 18th Century, when artists went on the "Grand Tour" to Italy to study the rich Italian and Greco-Roman artistic and architectural history found throughout the country. Particularly striking is a small hand-colored sketch by Sir William Hamilton, focusing on the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, which vividly captures the oranges and yellows of a burning fire amidst a black, smoky sky.

The exhibition also displays the work of Lear's contemporaries James M. W. Turner and J.D. Harding, who saw the usefulness of studying Italian classical monuments alongside beautiful landscapes. Most notable among these works is Turner's Venice, the Mouth of the Grand Canal, a light-filled, ethereal watercolor which affirms Turner's understanding of the varying effects of atmospheric conditions on landscape. Like Lear, these artists expanded the "Grand Tour" to explore countries in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. Together, their works provide an important context for Lear's painting.

While the similarity of the subject matter in the works does deprive the exhibition of some of its vitality, it nevertheless covers an important aspect of British art's development and is fairly representative of how 19th-century British artists perceived foreign landscapes. Furthermore, the Edward Lear exhibit pays tribute to a great patron of Yale's art collection: Donald Gallup '34, former curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Books Library. Gallup donated his comprehensive Lear collection to the BAC. The exhibition thus not only keeps alive the works of Lear, but also the memory of Gallup, who passed away just two weeks before the show's September 20 opening.

Back to A&E...