Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense

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Acclaimed historian Jenny Uglow brings us a fascinating and beautifully illustrated biography of Edward Lear, full of the colour of the era. Lear lived a vivid, fascinating energetic life but confessed, 'I hardly enjoy any one thing on earth while it is present.' He was a man in a hurry, 'running about on railroads' from London to country estates and boarding steamships to Italy, Corfu, India and Palestine. He is still loved for his 'Nonsenses', from startling joyous limericks to great love songs like 'The Owl and the Pussy Cat' and 'The Dong with a Luminous Nose', and he is famous too for his brilliant natural history paintings of parrots, landscapes like the Monastery of Zografu Athos, and travel writing. His many friends included Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelite painters. His genius for the absurd and his dazzling wordplay make him a very modern spirit. Children adored him, yet his humour masked epilepsy, depression and loneliness. Lear's sexuality was fluid and he liked the idea of marriage but fell in love with Frank Lushington, with whom he travelled to Crete but did not achieve the closeness he hoped for. He escaped the tension of the relationship with a visit to the Holy Land, where he created intensely pigmented watercolour studies of Petra, Masada and other ancient sites. Jenny Uglow brings us his swooping moods, passionate friendships and restless travels and shows how this uniquely gifted man lived all his life on the boundaries of rules and structures, disciplines and desires, an exile of the heart. Gorgeous colour illustrations pepper the text with Lear's verse and drawings, archive photographs and natural history paintings in colour. A beautifully bound and produced Faber & Faber publication, 598 pages in a hefty tome with pagemarker and gold tooling and scarlet cloth binding
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