In Edward Lear’s detailed diary, he noted that on Saturday, September 8, 1883, he took a train from Florence to Pisa, where he stayed at the Royal Victoria Hotel, popular with British travelers, and visited the majestic cathedral complex. The following two days, he went on excursions to nearby Il Gombo or the Tenuta di San Rossore along the Tuscan coast, an estate owned throughout the centuries by the grand duke of Tuscany, the House of Lorraine, and the royal Savoy family. Lear commented on Sunday, September 9, that he “went out at 8.30 in a one horse trap . . . to the Gombo or great Tenuta of pine wood . . . no end of camels at the Cascine.”¹ On September 10, he returned, noting, “7.10 set off with Ettore and the 1 horse trap, and soon saw no end of camels, fallow deer, to great pleasure . . . at 8 began a drawing of the great pines, but—horror—found that what I had taken for a lot of paper was all solid board, and that I had only one single piece left!! Nor any other chance of drawing but in a small book, for I could not send for more paper as I might have done, because the driver Ettore had utterly gone away!! Next I lost a pencil.”² This drawing is the one Lear mentions, as confirmed by the date and time inscribed on the sheet. It depicts a broad view of the landscape near the ocean with Arabian one-humped dromedaries, which he refers to as simply camels, resting under a grouping of graceful umbrella (or stone) pines. Strong hatch marks through the trees suggest light as well as a breeze. Lear drew the scene with a pencil and added notations for the colors and the treatment of the light, such as “add green,” “dark,” “shades on broken earth,” “red grey earth,” “sky,” and “camels.” He used swift pen marks to reinforce the graphite lines, then applied colored washes.

Lear’s interest in camels can be traced back to a letter he wrote to his sister, Ann, between January 16 and February 3, 1846, from “the desert: outside the walls of Suez.” In it, he describes his experience of these “beasts of burden.” He compares the enjoyable feeling of riding one to sitting “on a rocking chair,” but found them to be easily irritated: “If you try to make them go faster—they grown [sic] . . . if you stop them or try to go slower—they growl also.”³

Dromedaries had been kept at the Gombo since at least 1622, when they were first introduced from North Africa by Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Tuscany. Others were added to the herd after the success of General Arrighetti against the Turks before the Battle of Vienna in 1683. New stock was imported by the Tuscan government from Tunisia in 1782, and the herd grew to more than two hundred. Lear would have experienced fewer animals, as the numbers diminished as a result of the Napoleonic Wars.⁴

Lear continued to record his drawing itinerary, noting that “only 4 pieces of the small paper being now left, I came at 11 to the Gombo, I walked . . . to the sea, where I drew the coast line—very near to where Shelley’s body must have been found. The whole seems before me as I write, as it did 22 years ago (1861) when I drew the coast nearer Spezia . . . with quiet and space of this lovely coast to day!!! . . . goats only about and no humanity.”⁵ He remarks on where the body of the English romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was washed ashore after a boat accident in 1822 and records other drawings that he made in rapid succession along the coastline, which have a similar color palette, indicate the time of day, and are numbered “4” and “5” (fig. 58.1).⁶ He left for Spezia on September 11, then Genoa on September 12, and returned home to San Remo on September 13. —Dena M. Woodall