by Jenny Uglow
Remarked the beauty of white sheets, both in light and shadow – also black bodies and white waist cloths – also extreme featheriness of coconut palms – depths of brown gray shade – brilliancy of bananas and general misty grayness … General tone of the mosque and tank view, deep beautiful dark gray, relieved with vividly bright bits of light … Walk on slowly, drawing at times. Endlessly beautiful pictures of village life and Eastern vegetation.
Eastern vegetation was his great delight. In Calcutta he escaped the viceregal fuss to sketch in the Botanic Gardens, and all through India he made inspired studies of trees, bamboo and banyan, peepul and mango. By contrast, he found the architecture hard to draw and often bought photographs for reference. The styles of building were disconcertingly unfamiliar, like the temples of Benares, ‘highly pagan and queer’. He coped better when the landscape framed the buildings, as it did the temples of Hurdwar, their pearly white and grey domes sharp against the green hills behind, or when the foreground detail was rich, as it was at Muttra, where palaces and mosques seemed to float above river banks full of bathers, fishermen, buffalo, crocodiles and turtles. (On one ‘scrap’ he drew an inset turtle, inscribed ‘Turtles = Yonghy Bonghy Bò’.) The greatest challenge of all was the monument he had most wanted to see, the Taj Mahal. He thought it the most beautiful of all earthly buildings; ‘Henceforth let the inhabitants of the world be divided into 2 classes, – them as has seen the Taj, – and them as hasn’t.’ Yet how to draw it? He made it a jewel in a garden, an Indian Villa d’Este, gleaming white at the end of an avenue of dark cypresses, ‘with innumerable parrots flitting across, – like live Emeralds’, above a dazzle of scarlet poinsettias and purple bougainvillea.
Tollygunge, Calcutta, painted between 24 December 1873 and 5 January 1874
Trying to orient himself, Lear searched for comparisons in art, as well as in familiar scenery. Looking at plains and winding rivers, he wrote of Poussinesque landscapes and Claude-like scenes, at once alike and utterly different. On the Malabar coast:
the infinite lines of low hills and high mountains are all quite a la Claude Lorraine distance, yet the texture of Cocoa-nuttery is something quite unlike. The rivers in this view are wonderfully beautiful while the sun is low; and all the colour, – changes of gray and misty lilac, and palest opal blue (not opal though, for that is clear whereas here all is misty and damp) makes a world of divinely exquisite beauty … such scenery may be compared to eating rich Plum Pudding continually.
In the Himalayas, he set aside the classical picturesque of Poussin and Claude for other models, painters of the sublime, such as Turner, his idol since childhood. In 1872 he had been reading Thornbury’s life of Turner, ‘A stupidly written book: – like Shakespeare, his works proclaim the man: & it don’t really matter what Shakespeare or Turner were (though it would be pleasant to know), seeing they have left proofs of almightiness.’ The other hero was the great American artist Frederic Church, whose paintings Lear had seen on show in London. He judged Church second only to Turner, he wrote later, ‘& one of his works “The Heart of the Andes” hangs always before me’.
He found touches of the sublime early in his trip, at the Marble Rocks of Nerbudda, where the river rushes through the limestone ravine, its glistening rocks reflected in the water. Greater visions were to come. He had commissions to paint Kanchenjunga, one of the highest mountains of the Himalayas, and when he arrived in Darjeeling in mid-January, in the depths of winter, he was overwhelmed: ‘Wonderful wonderful view of Kinchinjunga!!!!!’ Next day he wrote nervously that it did not seem a very ‘sympathetic’ mountain: ‘it is so far off, so very God-like & stupendous.’ At sunrise it was a glory; in the afternoons ‘a wonderful hash of Turneresque colour & mist & space’; by evening it was clear and rose-coloured again. Rising before dawn Lear drew half-frozen, kept going by Giorgio piling on cloaks and blankets. In his later paintings, he showed the mountain rising above a V-shaped gap in dense forest. In the foreground he painted a Buddhist shrine, as if the road might lead to a sacred place beyond true comprehension.
Kinchenjunga from Darjeeling (1877)
Such magnificence was true Romantic sublimity, whose chief effect, in Burke’s terms, was astonishment, when the mind was suspended, almost with terror.
Rather to his surprise, this mood returned when he saw the ruins of the seventh-century Hindu rock-temples, shrines and sculptures of Mahabalipuram on the Coromandel coast. These spoke to the heart of the poetical-topographer: ‘The poetical character of this remarkably beautiful and interesting place is of a higher order than that of any I have yet seen in India, being so unique and ancient, and yet so unmixed by any sort of contamination of Modernism, still less of Anglo Saxonism.’ The site opened his eyes to the drama of other southern glories, the great, sweeping rock of Trichinopoly, and the massive, melancholy, thousand-year-old temple of Tajore. He had found his own, unexpected sublime.
In November 1874, Lear and Giorgio sailed to Ceylon to get away from the Malabar heat. They were there for a month, but their stay was troubled and weary. They walked on the beaches and Lear sketched the bread-fruit trees and the boats, but it rained, and he was tired. At the start of December Giorgio became ill with dysentery. Lear nursed him, panicked when he saw a basin full of blood from a nosebleed, and watched him as he slept, ‘good and patient always … I go to bed, but with no light heart. Pray God he may recover!’ When he seemed better, Lear took him back to the mainland. But even the Malabar coast had lost its charm, so they took a boat from Cochin to Bombay, without stopping as Lear had planned at Mangalore or Goa. As consolation Lear read, often books he had read before. On New Year’s Eve, he was drawing the Coorg mountains, complaining of a sore back and a cold, but enraptured by the country he was leaving:
Still getting out cargo at Cannamore; big barrels; still the clamour of savagery, the poppling of the sea, the grinding of the machinery, and the rising and falling of the cargo boats. A strange, foolish calmness of beautiful colour and sunshine over all. Thousands of seagulls sit on the waves, scores of bright red-brown falcons with white heads soar aloft … At 4.45 we go off and the land of Coorg fades into pale lilac distance. My back is so bad I am hardly able to go downstairs … Nevertheless, I must needs be thankful, and greatly so, that 1874 ends as it does, and that I have had such a year of active, constant pleasure, with so little suffering.
On New Year’s Day, off Mangalore, he ‘finished Jane Eyre’. On deck he sketched, writing on one sunset watercolour scrap, ‘gold light off’, ‘green’, ‘orange’, ‘absolute Turner’. In Bombay, among the stack of post, a letter brought the terrible news that Giorgio’s wife had died in Corfu. It was best, Lear thought, to go home straight away. On 12 January 1875, after fourteen months away, they sailed for Europe.
37: FAMILIES
There was an old man whose Giardino
Was always so cheerful and green O –
Every hour he could spare, – He sate in a chair
In the midst of his summer Giardino.
Arriving home at the Villa Emily in early 1875, Lear found that he had been burgled. The thieves had taken very little but had broken into trunks and made a horrible mess. But to his delight, ‘The garden is beautiful with Oranges!!’ For the first time he could give his own mandarin oranges to friends. When the sun warmed he filled pots and sowed seeds brought back from India, including a glorious purple morning glory from Bangalore. He put up arches and trellises, exchanged plants with neighbours – wallflowers for begonias – and bought new ones from nearby nurseries. In the spring he was up at five watering his seeds, and in June he could walk on the terrace in ‘a wonder of loveliness’ – geraniums and clematis, roses and passion flowers, lilies and carnations. His moods swooped up and down like changeable weather: cold, wretched, lonely; warm, content, busy. One day he walked over to Bordighera feeling that ‘nothing could be lovelier than the sea and sky with Corsica clear as light, on the horizon’. As he penned out and coloured his Indian sketches and reread
his diary the Durbah in Delhi and the ghats of Benares began to feel like a queer dream.
By now he was a fixture in San Remo. When Augusta Tozer, wife of Henry Tozer, whose Researches in the Highlands of Turkey Lear greatly admired and who became a good friend, passed through San Remo with her brother, the dashing diplomat Ernest Satow, ‘Mr. Ed. Lear, artist’ was one of the first people they met. Satow went out with this ‘odd stout big man of 64’ to help him choose a piano, walked with him, dined with him and pored over his sketches of Kanchenjunga and the red pagodas of Benares. Lear was out and about all the time, greeting friends who stayed in the hotels, calling on Sir Matthew and Lady Digby Wyatt, who had a villa up the hill, old friends whom he had known since his time in Rome and often visited in London. Digby Wyatt was an architect, secretary to the Great Exhibition in 1851, responsible for the construction of Paxton’s Crystal Palace, and later the first Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge, and although he was now ill they had plenty to talk about, serious and frivolous. Lear often fell into nonsense with Mary Wyatt, his ‘Dear Mrs Digby’, and now, combining friendship with gardening, he sent her a long word-play letter.
*
Dear Lady Wyatt
If am interrupting you please excuse me
as I mint to have asked you a question the other day
but forgot to mint-ion it. Can you tell me how to make
preserved or dry mint? I have got a
mint of
mint in my garden, but although I
am int-erested in getting some of it dried for
pea soup, I am in terrible ignorance of how to dry it,
and am in torture till I know how.
And so it ran on, the column widening to ‘Minton pottery’, the river ‘Mintcio’ and Disraeli the new ‘Prime mint-ster’.
From outside Lear appeared affable, interested, talented, funny, but in his diary, late at night or waking ill in the mornings, the loneliness poured out. ‘Weary days’, he wrote, ‘wearisome work’. These were favourite terms of lament, recalling Tennyson’s Mariana waiting for the lover who never comes: ‘She said “I am aweary, aweary,/ I would that I were dead.”’ But Lear did not wish to be dead. He was too busy with his work and his garden, too alive to the sea and sky and olive-covered hills, too curious about the families close to him.
*
He thought too of his own family. To his great sadness Sarah had died in New Zealand while he was in India, but one joy of the spring of 1875 was a visit from her son Charles and his wife Sophy, who told him how active she had been to the last, working in her garden and playing the piano to her great-grandchildren. ‘What a life!’ Lear wrote. ‘As her son says, she was indeed one of a million. This nephew & niece are a very loveable lot, & full of intellectual enjoyment.’ Their visit made him think he must see Ellen, now frail and almost blind from cataracts, ‘the only one remaining of all my thirteen sisters’, sinking into darkness. He wanted to go back anyway, to show his Indian drawings. In early June 1875 he left for England.
In London Lear was touchingly, warmly, greeted. People poured into his rooms in Duchess Street and by the end of the month he had sold over £300 of drawings. Lady Ashburton asked for a large-scale painting of Kinchenjunga, offering £700, the most he had ever received for a picture, and he agreed to paint another seven-foot version for Henry Bruce, Lord Aberdare, and soon another for Northbrook. He was out to dinner, concerts, garden parties and lunches, meeting the Parkyns and Walter Bethell – ‘they say Gussie is happy though’ – and enjoying himself with Johnny and Catherine Symonds and Marianne North, whose dazzling paintings amazed him. On the odd occasions that he was alone, he ate at the zoo or at Simpson’s in the Strand or walked nostalgically to the Blue Post, where he and Fortescue had always met. At the weekends he took the train to Leatherhead to see Ellen, putting up with her pious ways, or stayed with Bern Husey Hunt in Sussex, or at Strawberry Hill where Lady W., concerned with grander guests, whisked past him like a flash but Fortescue seemed completely unchanged. Yet Fortescue was changed, at least in title: in April 1874 he had become Baron Carlingford. Lear had heard the news in Simla, writing at once:
O! Chichester, my Carlingford!
O! Parkinson, my Sam!
O! SPQ, my Fortescue!
How awful glad I am!
For now you’ll do no more hard work
Because by sudden-pleasing jerk
You’re all at once a peer, –
Whereby I cry, ‘God bless the Queen!
As was, & is, & still has been’.
Yours ever, Edward Lear.
Delighted as he was to see Fortescue and to gossip about politics, including Disraeli’s move to make Victoria ‘Empress of India’ and Dizzy’s own transformation into the Earl of Beaconsfield, Lear felt awkward among the Strawberry Hill glitterati. His closest friendship, peaceful now, was with Frank Lushington. He saw the Lushingtons the minute he arrived, ate with them in the evenings in London and stayed with them at their new summer retreat in Kent. But four-year-old Clare, always delicate, had died in May, and Lear was full of sympathy and tenderness towards little Harry and Mildred, now five, and especially to Gertrude, who at twelve was old enough to join them at supper. ‘Gertrude is a duck,’ he decided. Frank was proud of Lear’s achievements, telling Emily Tennyson, ‘Lear is at 8 Duchess St, with some exquisite drawings from India & elsewhere – I hope he is selling them rather successfully & quickly – and in general spirits & looks he seems to me better than 3 years ago.’ At the end of his stay, Lear spent his last three days with them, waving goodbye to Kate and the ‘really dear nice children’ before he left for Folkestone. Back in Italy he still felt attached to the family, as by a string, imagining them going back to Norfolk Square, ‘Frank & Kate, Gertrude, Milletts & ’arry’. Kate was pregnant again, and in December Lear was godfather once more, to their new son, Franklin. When he collected his poems for a new book, he thought straight away of the Lushingtons: ‘sat up very late writing out the two poems for Gertrude L’.
He kept in touch with friends through constant letters (‘Letters are the only solace of my life at present’, he had written once to Mary Wyatt, ‘except sardines & omelettes’), and was delighted when they came to see him. In 1876 Johnny and Catherine Symonds walked admiringly round his garden, then Frank Lushington came, pacing on the terrace in the rain. Lear missed him badly when he left. Would they ever meet again, he asked, musing on the possibility of some afterlife where friends found each other: ‘That all this trouble-whirl of sorrow and worry – all these entangled & dumb feelings are nil – I cannot believe.’ To cheer himself up he took a picnic and went sketching: a ruined tower, the flickering shade of olive trees, green banks with yellow flowers ‘& red poppies & delicate shaking wild oats’. It was silent except for birdsong and he sat on a wall to write his journal, thinking of long-past Campagna days ‘& many many such later with the good Suliot’.
The house was alive with guests. Northbrook stopped on his way back from India – he had resigned as viceroy in January. Henry Bruce, Lord Aberdare, stayed nearby with three of his children and in July Charles Church came for a week; at some point Lear gave Church his journal of their trip to Greece in 1848, and a hundred sketches from that time. When the visitors had gone, Lear sketched and painted, wrote nonsense and drew his bizarre botany. In quieter evenings, perhaps in his ‘Armchairia Comfortabilis’, he read book after book – natural history books and memoirs, Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, Sir John Kaye’s History of the Indian Mutiny, and a pile of novels, from Disraeli’s Lothair and Colonel Meadows Taylor’s ‘semi-historic’ Indian sagas to the women writers he admired. Middlemarch, he thought, was ‘a curiously clever book’ with bits that ‘do me good’; Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers ‘a wonderfully beautiful, but sad book’. In the autumn he noted, ‘I am reading just now a good deal of Miss Edgeworth’s books. Clever, undoubtedly – but not like Miss Austen or Mrs Gaskell’s – or C Bronte’s.’
As Lear worked and read, life
in the Villa Emily had been changing. Over the years he had become sucked into Giorgio’s family problems. He worried about his children, after his wife and then his mother died, and sometimes wondered if he should bring them all to San Remo. He hesitated to suggest this, but he kept in touch by letter with Giorgio’s eldest son, Nicola, and ten-year-old Dmitri, and was pleased when Giorgio returned from Corfu in the autumn of 1876 with his second son Lambi (Charalampos), who joined the household on wages of £5 a week. He fretted about Giorgio’s health: when he was ill and a glass of vermouth helped, Lear dashed out to order three bottles. He felt responsible for them all – should he perhaps buy a small house in Corfu to leave to Giorgio? ‘But must ask F.L. first.’ (Frank was still his touchstone for all plans, as well as his legal and financial adviser.) They talked things over when Giorgio came in to smoke his cigar on Sunday evenings and they drank together – perhaps too much. ‘Alack! alack!’ Lear exclaimed that summer. ‘The barrel of Marsala is near at an end.’
*
While he worried about the Kokali family Lear also became more involved with the Congreves. The boys had grown up in the years he had known them. The fourteen-year-old Arny – still very boyish – was thrilled to receive Lear’s present of ‘Wolff’s Wild Animals’ with its superb illustrations. Hubert, however, was now a young man – clever, energetic and handsome, ‘well and strong, which it is a pleasure to see’. In May 1875, on Hubert’s seventeenth birthday, Lear carried a bundle of small presents over to breakfast, ‘a volume of Loudon’s botany – H. & F.L.’s poems – a plant of saxifrage – & an opera glass’. He was offering small slices of his own life, his youthful botanical interests, his garden (which Hubert helped him with), the poems of the Lushington brothers, his love of music. He spent evenings at their house and the boys came over to his: ‘Dinner good; & the boys – a nice good lot all – happy; – happier in looking at Parrots & Zoological drawings.’