by Jenny Uglow
*
In the summer of 1863, while Lear was working on his lithographs, William of Denmark accepted the Greek crown, becoming George I of Greece. Henry Storks dissolved the Ionian parliament and called a new one to vote formally on the cession of the islands. When George I visited London in September Lear wrote flippantly to Fortescue, asking him to ‘write to Palmerston to ask the Queen to ask the King of Greece to give me a “place”, specially created ‘& the title o’ Aρχàνοηδιϕλναραποιòς with permission to wear a fool’s cape (or mitre) – 3 pounds of butter yearly and little pig, – and a small donkey to ride on. Please don’t forget this as I have set my heart on it.’
Lear’s portmanteau Greek word, Archanoēdiphluaríapoios, ‘Arch-nonsense-chatter-maker’, celebrated his role as the ‘Arch’ fool, the retainer with butter and pig and ass. But this was no comedy. On New Year’s Day 1864, when it seemed that handing over the islands would take longer than expected, Lear suddenly felt he must go back. An acquaintance was leaving next day and in a whirl Lear set off. For a few weeks he took up his old island life, refusing to think of future winters: ‘perhaps I may go about in an unfixed mode continually and evermore’. In particular he enjoyed his friendship with Evelyn Baring, sending illustrated letters – a letter snail, a letter cloud – and a phonetic letter enclosing photographs:
Deerbaringiphowndacuppelloffotografsthismawningwitch
isendjoo thereiswunofeechsortsoyookankeepbothifyoolike
todoosoanwenyoohaveabetterwunofyourselfletmehavit.
Yossin seerly
DwdL
Having time for serious reading he turned to Renan, Colenso and Phases of Faith by Francis Newman (brother of the cardinal), describing his steps towards a radical Unitarianism. But he also read novels, history and travels: Abbé Michaud’s novel of the Inquisition, Le Maudit, Froude’s hostile study of Elizabeth I, Richard Burton’s Abeokuta and the Cameroon Mountains and John Hanning Speke’s account of his second journey to discover the source of the Nile.
Reading filled an uneasy time of waiting. Among the Corfiotes he found excitement, but also sorrow, confusion and unease, with servants, innkeepers and shopkeepers lamenting future loss of trade. They feared the loss of protection and as the garrisons took away cannon and blew up the forts, anti-British feeling rose. By the end of March his rooms were let to others. Sadly, Lear looked around:
The quiet of this house – the cheerful corner room – its green blinds – look out over the harbour – the large table – good fire etc – the long quiet study – an even light thru’ all the day – the good order of things – bkfast – hearing George read, & so on … are among the scenes & times I fear not to return.
He packed amid explosions at the forts and spring thunderstorms. ‘Goodbye,’ he ended a letter to Fortescue, ‘my last furniture is going. I shall sit upon an eggcup and eat my breakfast with a pen.’ He wrote to the Prescotts’ granddaughter, little Nora Decie, saying that he was going to join Captain Deverill’s three geese and swim all the way to Piraeus.
On 4 April 1864, a year to the day since he sailed to the Ionian islands, Lear left Corfu: ‘Once more I left the loveliest place in the world – with a pang.’ The next morning he woke early and wrote a rough draft of a poem:
She sits upon her Bulbul
Through the long long hours of night –
Watching And Where o’er the dark horizon gleams
The Yashmack’s fitful light.
The dark lone Yaourt sails slowly down
The deep & craggy dell –
And from his lofty nest, loud screams
The white plumed Asphodel.
Then he scrawled across the page, in large letters, ‘Alas! indeed yes!—’
*
Lear went first to Athens, exploring the new excavations around the Acropolis and calling on the elderly philhellenes of Byron’s generation, old General Church and the crusty George Finlay, author of the multi-volume History of Greece. But for Lear the city had lost its enchantment and instead of staying on, he sent for Giorgio and set off for Crete. He had read Robert Pashley’s 1837 book Travels in Crete, and although the island was ruled by Turkey he felt he must cover it for his proposed ‘topography of all Greece’.
The ship was full of pilgrims coming home from the Madonna of Tinos – site of a miraculous cure, a Greek Orthodox Lourdes – and their landing at Hania was chaotic. The land was hidden in cloud, the sea was rough, the women and children vomited, the hotel was filthy and the consul lived miles away. A young merchant, the Dutch consul Guarracino, came to his rescue by offering his comfortable house. Even better, Lear made friends with the English consul, Frank Drummond Hay, and his beautiful Spanish wife. Toward the end of his Cretan visit, he sang Tennyson songs to the Hays, worked with Mrs Hay on translating Tennyson into Italian and made an alphabet and an illustrated set of numbers for their four-year-old daughter Madeleine. One afternoon he fell asleep on the sofa after a walk and woke ‘to find little Madeleine lying by me with her arms round my neck kissing me and patting my eyes. Darling little child … what a blessing is this family!’
He tried to sketch every day but was bothered by perpetual wind and and rain, retreating to read Pashley and novels of the 1840s found on hosts’ bookshelves, such as Vanity Fair and then Villette, ‘a very lovely book’. The hills were hard to draw and he thought Crete a ‘sell’, not a patch on Sicily. ‘Its antiquities etc. so old as to be all but invisible; its buildings, monasteries, etc. nil; its Turkish towns fourth-rate. Rats O! and gnats.’ It was some years before the excavation of Crete’s Minoan civilisation and at Knossos Lear found only bushes and scattered brickwork. Yet as he moved eastwards along the coast to Heraklion and explored the inland hills, he made fine watercolour sketches of mountain views, monasteries and fountains, and drew comic doodles of the moufflons, the leaping mountain goats. The views Lear painted here were among his loveliest: swift, clear and serene, veiled with washes of colour.
He climbed through green valleys and drew under great oaks, gazing down across cornfields and groves of walnut and cherry. The climax was a view of Mount Ida, the nursery of Zeus, often veiled in cloud, but finally visible, ‘a dream-like vast pile of pale pink and lilac, with endless gradations and widths of distance and the long curve of sand from Rethymnon hills to Armyro. So I drew till long after sunset, and then came to this place, where I washed in a cheese plate and sat down with what patience I could.’ And the birds were here, making him a boy again:
the vast multitude of blackbirds, nightingales and many other sorts of birds … Far off, the cawing of the rooks, which brings back days – ‘days that are no more’ – so long ago as 1823, when I first heard the voice of the rooks in Sussex … ‘O life! O earth! O time! On whose last steps …’ It is noon, and considering how unwell I was yesterday, happiness abounds.
Mount Ida from Phre, 7 p.m., 24 May 1864
His notes were full of people as well as places, and of food as well as views: dinners with the pasha, lunches with the Hays, evenings with Cretan families, meals in country monasteries, ‘eggs, olives, caviar and astonishing wine!’ At village feasts they ate crumbly brown bread, herbs and ‘snails’ – the first time he and Giorgio had eaten them, finding them ‘really very decent, boiled in oil’. As usual Lear had come armed with letters of introduction, aware that the island was full of different communities: Turks and Greeks, Albanians and Arabs, Jewish, Armenian and Maltese traders, and African soldiers from the Egyptian rule in the 1830s. Waves of occupation marked the island. In Heraklion, with its flat-topped houses and broken mosques, he noted, ‘The Venetian cathedral, a ruined skeleton, speaks of former days.’ In the hills, as he walked through groves of olives and gardens of oranges and lemons, he passed villages toppled by earthquakes or sacked in uprisings. His companion in the wild Sphakian mountains, the haunt of freedom fighters, was Captain Michael Korakis (‘Crow’), a veteran of earlier rebellions. He was called ‘the Garibaldi of Crete’, Lear noted, but ‘now i
n the Turkish government’s pay – only they don’t pay him.’ Two years later, in 1866, Korakis would command twenty thousand partisans against the Turks. In this uprising, suppressed with terrible brutality, the Cretan rebels who were besieged at the monastery of Arkhadi blew it up rather than surrender. Lear’s host, Abbot Gabriel Marinakis, ‘a man of the world … very jolly and pleasant’, gave the order himself, and died in the explosion.
Lear sensed the bloodshed ahead when one elderly man accosted him, ‘When will our unhappy country be freed?’ But despite the tensions, when he stood on the deck of the steamer at the end of May 1864, he already felt nostalgic: ‘All Crete diminishes, fades, vanishes: but we see Ghonia, we see Platania, we see the pleasant Halepa, where we have spent so many happy days. We see the long range of Sphakian mountains, now nearly snowless. Last of all, lo! Ida fades.’
He had travelled from island to island. And sometimes it seemed that he would journey like this, ‘for ever roaming with a hungry heart’, to the very end of his life.
28: ‘WHAT A CHARMING LIFE AN ARTIST’S IS!’
There was an Old Man with an owl,
ho continued to bother and howl;
He sate on a rail, and imbibed bitter ale,
Which refreshed that Old Man and his owl.
Lear could not settle, but nowhere seemed right after Corfu. He needed to winter abroad, but somewhere that British people gathered, so that he could sell his pictures. In October 1864 he wrote whimsically to friends, saying he would fly away south to someplace, he didn’t know or much care where, as long as it began with ‘a Nem’. In the end he settled on Nice, apologising that at least it was the next letter in the alphabet. The next winter would be V for Venice, and then the promised M – for Malta.
In the summers he knew that it was vital to stay visible in Britain to keep his reputation alive, and to catch up on the gossip and the exhibitions. Art, science and politics were discussed at the dinner tables as Lear swung down the rope of familiar names – Baring, Bethell, Bruce, Drummond, Fairbairn – and on down the alphabet to the Prescotts and Tennysons, Fortescue and ‘Lady W.’, as Lear called her. He saw Frank and Kate Lushington, whose first son, Harry, was born in August, and he caught up, too, with his elderly sisters, Sarah and Ellen, who were stricken by the sudden death of Sarah’s son Fred in Arundel. On a ‘hot & lovely oldfashioned day’ Lear took the train from Victoria to his funeral, passing Peppering on the new line, remembering Fred as a baby and himself as a boy. It was strange to see Fanny Coombe, as he did on every visit to London – now a grandmother.
Inevitably, Lear went to the Tennysons. Farringford, he thought, was ‘one of the places I am really happy in’, but Tennyson was unpredictable and Lear had his doubts about Farringford’s bohemian chaos and reek of pipe tobacco and large wet dogs. Freshwater was changing, with the building of an enormous hotel, plans for three hundred houses, a new road and even talk of a railway, an idea that horrified Tennyson. Almost as bad, Lear thought, ‘Pattledom has taken entire possession of the place – Camerons and Princeps building everywhere: Watts in a cottage (not Mrs W.) and Guests, Schreibers, Pollocks, and myriad more buzzing everywhere.’ ‘Mrs W.’ was the sixteen-year-old actress Ellen Terry, who had married Watts, thirty years her senior, after he painted her portrait that spring, and soon regretted it, leaving him within a year: the Prinseps and Camerons had not welcomed his talented, outspoken child bride.
Lear was terrified of Julia Margaret Cameron, dashing between the houses in her Indian shawls with her fingers stained with photographic chemicals. Her daughter Julia had given her a camera the year before and she was already getting family, friends and servants to pose for her blurry scenes from history and poetry, creating her own negatives in wet collodion on glass plates. The following February Emily told Lear, ‘Mrs Cameron is making endless Madonnas and May Queens and Foolish Virgins and Wise Virgins and I know not what besides. It is really wonderful how she puts her spirit into people.’ Lear was not so sure. She was taking the first of her great portraits, which would include one of Holman Hunt in Eastern dress and many of Tennyson. (This summer Charles Dodgson also stayed in Freshwater, without his camera, asking her to take pictures for him of the prettiest children – in focus please.) Emily, Lear felt, was looking tired and Alfred, in expansive form, raved about England ‘“going down hill” – “best thing God can do is squash the planet flat”’. Lear sat with him reading scores of letters ‘from fools – madmen – admirers – would-be employers’. The following morning, Tennyson was in one of his most irritating moods:
I believe no other woman in all this world could live with him for a month … It always wrings me to leave Farringford – yet I doubt – as once before – if I can go again. I suppose it is the Anomaly of high souls & philosophic writings combined with slovenliness, selfishness, & morbid folly that prevents my being happy there: – perhaps also – vexation at myself for not being more so.
In London Lear opened his gallery, sending a vignette of studio visitors to Holman Hunt. Four ladies rise to go after staying two hours looking at his pictures: ‘What a treat my dear Mr Lear!’, ‘But how wrong to stay indoors, not good for your health’, and ‘how dreadful these interruptions must be!’ Four more ladies enter:
The first 4 rush up to them:
All 8 ladies: – How charming! How fortunate! Dear Mary! Dear Jane! Dear Emily! Dear Sophia! &c.
5th Lady – How wrong of you dear Mr. Lear to be in doors this fine day!
6th Lady: – How you can ever work I cannot think! You really should not admit visitors at all hours!
7th Lady – But do let us only sit and look at these beautiful sketches!
8th Lady – O how charming! & we will not go to Lady O’s.
The other 4 Ladies. – O then we also will all sit down again – it is so delightful. Chorus of 8 ladies. What a charming life an artist’s is!
Artist. – D—n!
More seriously, he felt, an artist’s life was hard. His pictures could never be perfect, he told Hunt; they were deformed, born with ‘one leg shorter than t’other’, or a crooked nose: not strong examples of their species. He longed to study and produce work true to nature in the Pre-Raphaelite vein but the whole pattern of his life went against this: good topographical painting, he decided, was safer to aim at.
Lear took another three-year lease on Stratford Place to show his paintings while he was away, and worked on commissions of the Campagna, Greece and Corfu, and on colouring his Crete drawings. And seeing that his Tyrants had done well, he bought new colours and brushes and ordered mounts from Foord’s for ‘the absurd and utopian batch of 240 I propose doing next year’. To take his mind off this he plunged into Henry Walter Bates’s account of the Amazon rainforests, which backed Darwin up in providing evidence of natural selection. Reading Bates, he fantasised about going to live in Ega, far up the great river, where jaguars roamed and huge butterflies flew. At Ega and in the Australian bush, he joked, there were ‘abundance of caterpillars highly edible & refreshing – & thus life for its few remaining years, would be cheaply sustained’. But he did not sail away to eat caterpillars. He simply went to Nice.
*
In Nice he found rooms on the Promenade des Anglais, laid out his Tyrants in groups of eight and began penning out and colouring. He met the English residents – Helena Cortazzi was there, rousing no pangs – but after a month of working on the Tyrants he was desperate to be on the move. With Giorgio he walked along the coast, through Menton and Monaco and Alassio all the way to Genoa, sketching bays and cliffs and twisted rocks, jagged in the lines of his pen. It was icy, winds howled and rain poured, and modern progress, as well as the weather, was blasting the natural world. ‘I tire sadly of this Corniche,’ Lear wrote crossly, ‘the lopsided views & blank gray sea – & this everlasting smash of Railway cuttings & blowings up & knocking down.’ The sun came out briefly when they reached Genoa at Christmas and then back they tramped to Nice through more rain.
On his
icy winter walk, and all through the spring, Lear made his sketches fast, with an almost abstract notation of line and distance, as if propelled into a new age. They had a clarity and strength that made them feel modern, strikingly unconventional.
He kept these sharp, bold drawings to himself: for his clients he returned to his familiar style, combining accuracy with drama and moody atmosphere. When he showed his Riviera watercolours in Nice, people crowded in with open purses – Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam handed him a cheque for £100 for six sketches.
Oneglia, Riviera di Ponente, 11.15 am, 12 December 1864
His watercolours and his new Tyrants sold well in his London gallery too; the Prince of Wales came, and bought ten. But as usual in his London summers, he fretted about money. Cedars of Lebanon and other big pictures were still priced too high to attact buyers, and he resented the struggle. Within weeks he was impatient, dreaming of distant lands: ‘I loathe London by the time I have been here a month. The walking – sketching – exploring – noveltyperceiving & beautyappreciating part of the Landscape painter’s life is undoubtedly to be envied: – but then the contrast of the moneytrying to get smokydark London life – fuss – trouble & bustle is wholly odious, & every year more so.’
He endured the long English summer, but as soon as Lady Waldegrave, coming to the rescue again, commissioned a painting of Venice he accepted at once. Previously he had taken against Venice, lamenting its lack of trees, but when he arrived at the start of November 1865, he was entranced. ‘How tremendously full of picturesqueness is every moment in Venetian canals.’ He stayed in Danieli’s hotel, rejoicing in the quiet after the noise of London: ‘O! O! what a sunset & what a dream of wonderful beauty of Air & Architecture! – Earth & Heaven!! … Silent Venice!’ He took gondolas along the canals and out to Murano, and made detailed drawings of the buildings, but often he set his pencils aside and settled for watercolour, pale washes of blue and grey, with amber tints and dark reflections. When the fog closed in, so that he could see no further than the boats at the quay, Venice vanished, but even then the atmosphere was beautiful.