by Jenny Uglow
Many Inglesi arrived for ‘the Season’, from January until April, enjoying the masked parades, balls and fireworks of Carnival and the dramatic Easter processions. Lear flung himself into the Carnival uproar with the Knightons, bombarding passers-by with confetti, filled with flour:
having disguised ourselves as women of Albano (fancy me with a red bodice, and green skirt – with a white scioccatura which is the name of the beautiful headdress the women wear … besides a black mask!!), we hired a coach and pelted away famously. But on the last evening is the best fun of all. Directly after the horse race, dusk begins and by degrees every door and window all down the long and narrow Corso becomes illuminated with candles called ‘mocoli’. The houses being of such vast height – the effect is wonderfully beautiful.
The streets were full of people carrying candles. The game, he explained, was to keep your own candle alight while extinguishing others with great cries and shouts: ‘It is as like magic as anything you can fancy.’
‘One may be very gay if one pleases,’ he admitted, downplaying his excitement. ‘At Torlone’s, the rich bankers, the other night nearly all Rome was present: cardinals – priests – Russians – English – French & Germans – all the world in fact. But I am pretty well sick of these things. When I come home at night with my key I often think of Gray’s Inn Road & Albany St!’ But he was fascinated by the people and their costumes, and by the flocks of priests of different orders, ‘white – black – piebald – scarlet – cinnamon – purple: round hats – shovel hats – cocked hats – hoods and caps’, cardinals and friars, bishops and monks, all in their own colours. He told Ann of the sleek grey cattle pulling carts, decorated with bells and ribbons, and of the Neapolitan pipers with peacock feathers in their caps who came to play for the Virgin at Christmas. And beyond the crowds, he was amazed at the way old ruins were mixed up with modern buildings, and stunned by the grandeur of the Coliseum and the Forum: ‘judge how bewildered one’s noddle becomes! – for my part, I am taking things very quietly – and like better to poke about over and over again in the Forum, than to hurry with the stream of sight-seers all day long.’ Soon Lear would paint the Forum with the Temple of Venus, in the golden evening light.
Temple of Venus and Rome (1840)
There were grim sides to city life, especially the ravages of the recent cholera epidemic, but Lear was in love with it all. The January weather was mild as May, and he dreamt of bringing Ann out to join him ‘– so – if I were you, I would get up my Italian … Other folks have sisters and wives and mothers here, so I don’t see why I should not too.’ Ann did think about coming, amusing him with her poor Italian geography when she suggested she might travel via Naples. But although he sent her details of ships and prices, in a way he was happier that she was at a distance. Money was short and by the following March he admitted that ‘coming here, at present, is I think out of the question’. Still his family and friends were always in his mind. His letters to Ann were filled with references to their sisters Ellen and Sarah, Florence and Harriett, and to old London friends like the kindly Nevills. He kept in touch too with the Sussex Coombes and with George Cartwright and his wife Henrietta, who visited him in Rome, ‘two of the best and nicest people I have known’, he told Fanny Coombe. He enjoyed gossiping to Fanny, telling her things that would make her gasp:
Last Friday a Roman Lady of 50 – in love with a soldier, threw herself out of a window in the next street – & on Monday a younger damsel from the same cause (Roman also) did just the same a few doors off, her lover taking poison just after; they talk of English suicides but all I can say is that these make up the 7th that have occurred in a space not larger than that from you to the Norfolk Arms, during the 2 years I have been here!! – Yesterday a poor English woman suffering from tic doloreux – Mrs Dunbar, next door but one to me – also killed herself in a paroxysm of insanity. There! I think I have given you sufficient horrors.
In a different vein, he tried to keep up with natural history interests as a way of expressing his gratitude to Lord Derby, to whom he also sent many drawings and watercolours. He had promised to look for specimens and to tell Derby about the collection of the naturalist Joseph Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew, now Prince of Musignano. In time he came to know the Bonaparte family well, staying with them at their villa in the country, but for the moment the prince was in France and Lear had nothing to report: little birds were scarce, he explained, as thousands were shot for daily food and there were no new canaries or parrots in the bird markets. He was reduced to telling Derby of Italian practices like the skinning of frogs in Milan – he watched them capering about as if nothing had happened – and the clipping of cats’ tails (a fate that later befell his own cat, Foss), so that ‘they will never forsake the house in which they have lost that useful member’. In Rome, he confessed, ‘my zoological notes are at a most deplorably low ebb’. When he wrote this on a cold February day, his spirits were also low: ‘It is all very beautiful and wonderful here, – but – it is not England, & I am stupid enough to get into very homesick fits sometimes.’
*
Apart from occasional homesickness, Lear was happy. He drank in the beauty and history of the city, the blue blaze of the sky, the water splashing in mossy fountains, the long shadows of columns in the gold light of sunset. He illustrated his letters with sketches, of Holy Week fireworks at the Castel St Angelo, of Maecenas’s villa, of the avenues and fountains of Tivoli. Lear loved Tivoli, as all the artists did, painting identical views of the great cypress avenues and fountains of the Villa d’Este: ‘I used to stay there constantly,’ he told a friend, ‘& one year for 8 months as it is cool in the summertime.’ The place that moved him most, however, was the Campagna, the great plain between the city and the encircling hills. In ancient times this had been a fruitful area, rippling with corn, but the Goths had smashed the Roman aqueducts that brought water from the mountains and over the centuries the flooded fields had declined into wastes and malarial marshes. The bare Campagna was a glory of wild flowers in spring, but arid under summer sun and menacing and gloomy when dusk fell. There were few houses or huts, Lear noted, only herds of buffaloes and great flocks of sheep ‘guarded by horribly fierce dogs – which it is not safe to go near’. He thrilled to the scattered ruins and arches and fallen aqueducts:
The ancient tombs & old Roman roads are just as they were, in some places. You don’t meet peasants as you seem to think, for it is loneliness itself; foxes & hawks – tortoises & porcupines, are the only inmates … The mighty aqueducts, the umbrella pines, the blue mountains beyond, the colours shining in the clear atmosphere … It is impossible to give any good idea of the amazing wildness and beauty of these plains.
Campagna of Rome from Villa Mattei, from Views in Rome and its Environs (1841)
In the mid-seventeenth century Claude Lorrain had painted the Campagna and had included these scenes in his Liber Veritatis, the ‘Book of Truth’ of almost two hundred drawings. Engraved and published in three volumes between 1778 and 1819, Claude’s drawings inspired Turner to create his own series of prints, his Liber Studiorum, from 1806 to 1824. For Lear, Claude and Turner were inspiring models. ‘You have little notion how completely an artist’s paradise is Rome’, he told Ann vehemently, ‘– and how destitute all other places would be of capacities to study and prosper. Rome is Rome – do not think about the future; let us be thankful that so far all is and has been so much better than we could ever have expected.’
10: HAPPY AS A HEDGEHOG
There was an Old Man of Vesuvius,
Who studied the works of Vitruvius;
When the flames burnt his book, to drinking he took,
That morbid Old Man of Vesuvius.
In early May 1838 Lear left his paintings with William Theed and headed for Naples with James Uwins. They took the inland route, walking through the mountains and staying in country inns where they shared a single echoing room with family, servants, animals and fleas. Writing on his
birthday, 13 May (‘26 today’), he told Ann:
In England you would be shocked to catch 5 in a morning – here 100, are nearer the mark. The only way to get rid of them is this, which I adopt very frequently: strip entirely, & then shake out your clothes well & then walk up & down the room barefooted – presently the creatures settle on your feet like mites on a cheese, & you may kill them by dozens.
Setting off at dawn they watched people come down from the hills to work, men carrying tools, women balancing cradles on their heads, knitting or spinning as they went. Day after day they walked on, over rocky passes where eagles soared, through oak forests, across torrents and past castles and villages, eventually climbing up to the convent on the precipice of Monte Cassino, ravaged by the French but with its famous library intact. In this rough country they found no real hardship, only pigs and spinning wheels and fat children: ‘rollypoly babies abound’. ‘And universally’, Lear wrote, ‘the people are as kind, obliging, & respectful as it is possible to wish. So much for the “dangers and difficulties of walking among Italian mountains”!! What stuff! Clapham Common is at least doubly awful.’
By contrast Naples was a nightmare. Its surroundings were paradise, ‘but the town itself is all noise, horror – dirt, heat – & abomination – & I hate it.’ Writing to Ann, he evoked the cacophony of the main street, the Toledo: They yell & shout – nobody in Naples speaks – in a manner quite superhuman.
They allow themselves no repose. If you empty all the streets of the capitals of Europe into one – then turn in some thousand oxen, sheep, goats, monks – priests – processions – cars – mules – naked children & bare legged mariners – you may form some idea of the Toledo … yet at 8 o’clock people lounge & eat ices at every door although the noise is like all the thunder in the world.
The chaos was made worse by the royal family charging up and down in carriages, escorted by soldiers and kettledrums. At the market, too, Lear was deafened:
As you pass, every woman screams out – ‘will you sit?’ ‘will you drink?’ ‘will you give me something?’ ‘anything?’ ‘a grana?’ Signor, Signor, Signor, Water, Water, Fish – Meat – muscles – oysters – baskets – eggs – roses – apples – cherries? – while every man steps before you overwhelming you with the most tremendous shouts of ‘Come along Sir – come; a boat! a boat! – instantly – now – this minute – this minute! To Capri – to Vesuvius – to Sorrento – to wherever you please – a boat, boat boat boat!!!’
By chance, Lear and Uwins were in the same hotel as the artist Samuel Palmer and his wife Hannah (‘Anny’), in the middle of their two-year Italian honeymoon. Palmer was thirty-two and Anny nineteen and they had arrived in Rome the previous winter, finding their feet at the same time as Lear. ‘Italy – especially Rome, is quite a new world,’ Palmer thought. In the brilliant sunlight he produced vibrantly colourful paintings, a complete change from his earlier work. ‘Much as I love England, I think every landscape painter should see Italy,’ he wrote. ‘It enlarges his IDEA of creation and he sees at least the sun and air fresh as from the head of their maker.’
The windows of the Hotel de la Ville de Rome looked across the bay, and the sea at night, said Anny, lay ‘like a sheet of glittering silver with the beautiful full moon’. Lear too thought the bay was fine and Vesuvius was beautiful, green at the foot and lilac on the heights. But although he saw a fine eruption, an unforgettable midnight display, he ended by calling the volcano a ‘filthy old mountain’, cursing its grumblings and complaining that its bad air nearly killed him. The sulphur springs of Pozzuoli also made Lear ill and breathless, and he was glad to escape. For clear, cool air, he and Uwins headed to the walled town of Corpo di Cava, at the head of a high wooded valley looking down to the Bay of Salerno. It was a place ‘always held in high admiration by the admirers of picturesque scenery’, as Richard Colt Hoare had put it in 1819: ‘To these sequestered scenes both Gaspar Poussin and Salvator Rosa directed their attention; and the modern landscape painter, who is anxious for improvement, cannot employ his time better than following in their footsteps.’ Lear was certainly anxious for improvement, and – perhaps influenced by James Uwins, whose uncle Thomas Uwins had painted here a decade before – on this trip he switched from soft chalks to harder, crisper pencil, giving bolder outlines and sharper detail. He penned in his sketches in the evening in sepia ink, keeping his scribbled notes on colour, tone, shadow and detail.
Lear’s ambition was changing subtly: he was now increasingly keen to use his sketches as the basis for oils, and for larger, more finished watercolours that he could paint when he was back in his studio. At Corpo di Cava, he worked on his first oil paintings: fluent studies of rocks and trees, a still life and a glimpse of a girl in a lane. The village seemed to encourage experiment: the Palmers also came up here and Samuel painted the ‘Titian-like’ mountains in the crimson glow of sunset.
Amalfi, July 1838
In the mountains Lear heard birdsong rather than street cries and feasted on macaroni soup, strawberries, cherries and wine. His botanist self revelled in the aloes in bloom, the figs and oranges, pomegranates full of scarlet blossoms, wild red lilies, larkspur, roses and myrtle, and the chestnut woods echoing with cuckoos and nightingales. After they left he and Uwins went on, restored, to Salerno, Eboli and Paestum with its ‘monstrous yet exquisitely beautiful temples’ on the plain by the sea. Then, after another cool week in the mountains, they explored Sorrento and Amalfi, where Lear sketched the houses clinging to the rocky cliffs.
At Amalfi they lodged for three weeks in the Albergo Cappucini, writing their names in the guest book as ‘Pittori Inglesi. Contentissime’. Their stay overlapped with that of two Italian painters, Achille Vianelli and Ercole Gigante (also ‘sempre contentissimi’). Both were members of the School of Posillipo, based on the Neapolitan waterfront, and the accurate outlines, hazy reflections and golden light of their watercolours were interestingly similar to Lear’s style.
He was overwhelmed by impressions, particularly when they visited Pompeii, feeling that everything he had read fell short of the reality: Pompeii alone was worth a journey from England. It was quite different, he insisted, to see the details of life stopped in a moment – marks where the wineglasses had been set down, still wet, the bones of men in the stocks, the names of shopkeepers written on the walls ‘just as you see them now, all over Italy’.
*
Rumours reached England that Lear was seriously ill in Amalfi, with signs of consumption, even spitting blood, but he soldiered on, and never reported this to Ann. The two friends returned slowly to Rome, travelling by the easier coastal route, resting like snails in the sweltering middle of the day. ‘What do you think of my new address?’ Lear asked Ann in September. On his return, finding that his landlady had doubled her prices, he had moved to rooms over a cafe in the Via Felice, near the Pincian gardens, where his fellow lodgers included the topographical artist Thomas Hartley Cromek, his wife Anastasia and his mother, a quiet, thrifty, household who became his good friends.
‘Rome continues to fill’, he wrote that autumn, ‘though there is no more room. It was never so full before.’ Half the English peerage seemed to arrive daily and his diary was packed with dinners and evening parties. If the previous winter had been costly, now he had some money in his purse, from lessons and commissions for studio drawings, done in soft pencil on half-tone paper, with white highlights. These drawings sold so well that to his delight he could put £100 aside to pay for travel in the summer. He also sent money home to his sisters and, despite their estrangement, to his mother. Some friends had left, including William Knighton, who gave up ideas of becoming an artist and became engaged to ‘a fooly Scotchwoman’: she never took to Lear, nor he to her. James Uwins too, went back to England and at first Lear missed him badly, but he went out to the country with Penry Williams and the sculptors Wyatt and Thrupp: ‘I am never very much alone,’ he crowed.
Lear was indebted to Williams, above all, for introd
ucing him to Civitella and Olevano, hilltop towns high in the Sabine hills fifty miles east of Rome. On his way south to Naples, Lear had admired Civitella perched above its rock staircase, with ancient stone walls all around ‘like Stonehenge … older by many hundreds of years than the Romans’, and had stopped in Olevano, crowned by its castle, where noisy children mobbed the artists as they sketched. These towns, gazing across the Serpentara forest to the mountains, topped with snow from October to May and hazy blue in midsummer, had long been a favourite retreat from the city heat: Coleridge had come here with his sculptor friend Washington Allston, writing in his notebooks of the dramatic views, forests and ravines. Lear joined the artists in the ‘grandeur and mountain solitude’ of late spring and early summer and at the vintage in September, ‘surrounded by chestnuts and olives and looking over boundless views – most of them exactly like pictures of Claude, who studied hereabouts’.
Among the crowd there in June 1839 were the Palmers and their friend Albin Martin. ‘We are every day in a large party of artists of different nations,’ Anny Palmer wrote home. ‘The scenery here is very very beautiful,’ the air fresh and delicious;