Edward Lear, by the age of sixteen, was employed as a draftsman. He worked at different times for the Zoological Society of London, the British Museum, and Lord Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby, recording his private menagerie of birds and mammals at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. As an ornithological draftsman, Lear published in 1830–32 by subscription The Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots and in 1846 Gleanings from the Menagerie and Aviary at Knowsley Hall, which included lithographs with hand coloring after Lear’s drawings from life. He popularized the limerick and was a writer of nonsense verse, such as The Owl and the Pussycat. Lear published A Book of Nonsense in 1846. After being an incessant traveler for most of his life, he settled in 1871 in San Remo on the Mediterranean coast, calling his residence “villa Tennyson.” It had been his ambition since 1852 to make and publish a collection of two hundred drawings based on the poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.¹

Lear departed from his ornithological career to become a topographical landscapist by 1837, though he made landscape drawings about 1834–36 of Sussex, Ireland, and the Lake District. The artist departed his native country in 1837, residing in Rome for ten years until 1848. He returned to England during this period in 1841 and 1845–46, when he gave drawing lessons to Queen Victoria. Though he planned to permanently settle in London in 1849, this idea was thwarted due to his ill health. In 1853 he began to travel extensively abroad in winter months and summered in England.² Lear was an untiring sketcher and traveled farther afield than most British artists to Italy, Greece, Albania, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, India, and Ceylon. He favored Greece, and believed that his “reputation will be that of a painter of Greek scenery principally.”³ Lear visited Greece and its islands on many occasions, first in the 1840s, then for long stretches in the late 1850s, and again in the early 1860s. He traveled to northern Greece to sketch Mount Olympus in 1848–49 and 1864. In this watercolor, he portrays Mount Olympus and the Antichasia mountain range behind the wide plains and winding Pineios River.⁴ He wrote in his journal on May 16, 1849, “The plains grew wider and wider . . . I feel that I am really in Thessaly, for width and breadth now constitute the soul and essence of all the landscape . . . the north only the distant form of Olympus rears itself above a low range of hills. . . . Before me all is vast, outstretched plain, which never seems to end.”⁵

As was his artistic practice, Lear first recorded this view of Mount Olympus with a pencil. Absent are his characteristic inscribed color and content notations, but he followed up by adding color washes and “penned out” the pencil sketch in his studio probably months later.⁶ He would sometimes develop his compositions into fully finished watercolors or oil paintings, and the vantage point is quite similar in this watercolor to other watercolor studies that he made of Mount Olympus in 1849, developed into an oil painting in 1864, and revisited again in 1885 with a sepia drawing of Mount Olympus for Tennyson’s poem “The Poet’s Mind.”⁷ Lear favored horizontal compositions with horizon lines placed along the center of the page for his watercolors. This arrangement worked well for landscape drawings from high vantage points, such as the present watercolor, which Lear drew from an elevated broad plain, beside a small hill along the Pineios River, near Argura and a few miles west of Larissa. To add spatial recession, Lear layered soft color washes, as seen here, with brown washes for the terrain in the foreground and gold hues dissolving into a soft pink, which then give way to the distant violet mountains, depicted in a linear fashion. His foregrounds characteristically contain only minimal natural elements; here, at lower left, swift brushstrokes suggest a few figures and cattle-driven carts—the only signs of life. —Dena M. Woodall