Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Lear did not want to be ‘new’ or experimental. He wanted to achieve the Romantic, the sublime. When he was in London he always went to the National Gallery to see the Claudes and the Turners, but in 1876 he wrote, ‘Depressed enough already – the glory & beauty of the Turners depressed me still more.’ A year later, when he heard that the Aberdares were delighted with his Kinchenjunga, he was nonsensically self-deprecating: ‘After all it is better to be the means of giving armless pleasure to a limited number of people, than to be the means of slaughtering indefinite thousands – though I grant the latter function requires the greater ability.’ That summer, Europe was reeling at the violent suppression of the Bulgarian uprising against the Turks, in which over fifty villages were burned and ten to fiteen thousand Bulgarian citizens massacred. For Lear, art was life, but this bitter juxtaposition to mass death is disconcerting, and the truncated ‘armless’, with its sense of missing a limb vital to a painter, spoke of his own insecurity.

  He was defensive: he felt his art to be trivial in comparison to the great and terrible events of the time, yet still important. He was embarrassed, too, at relying on the patronage of friends. In his letter to Aberdare he put the criticism into another’s mouth, but he felt it: ‘Said a foolish artist to me – “You can hardly be ranked as a Painter – because all you have done, or nearly all, – is merely the result of personal consideration, & you are comparatively if not wholly unknown to the public” – Says I to he, – that don’t alter the qualities of my pictures.’

  It did not matter if they were done to commission or bought in a gallery. If gallery pictures were ‘cried up & well hung up’ (which his had not been),

  they are safe to be bought – be they by Whistler or anybody else. But the voice of fashion whether it issues hout of a Hart Cricket in a Paper, or hout of the mouth of a Duke or a Duchess – ain’t by no means the voice of Truth. So you see o beloved growler – your ozbervations don’t affect me a bit, who haven’t got no ambition, nor any sort of Hiss Spree de Kor at all at all.

  The cockney-Irish and the nonsense masked Lear’s proud awareness that because he lacked esprit de corps, he saw and painted the world in his own way. In 1880 he was regaining his confidence. He finished Kinchenjunga for Northbrook and this summer saw it hung in his dining room, looking stunning. When he dined with Lady Ashburton in Knightsbridge, ‘the most sunshiny-intellectual woman’, he was amazed to see how good his Cedars and Kinchenjunga looked, and especially Kasr es Saàd, which he used to illustrate ‘The crag that fronts the even’ in his Tennyson series. It was let into a huge black frame, he told Fortescue, ‘all the room being gilt leather’! It did his spirit good, he said mockingly, ‘& walked ever afterwards with a nelevated & superb deportment & a sweet smile on everybody I met’.

  ‘The crag that fronts the Even’. Kasr es Saàd, Egypt (1856)

  Lear always felt that there was a vein of poetry within his art, but doubted that it would come out. In the Tennyson drawings it did.

  In the mountains in the summer of 1881 Lear drew outlines for fifty-four Tennyson designs, then penned them out and coloured them with wash. They illustrated lines from thirty-seven poems, all published before 1864: Lear took no lines from the later work, although Tennyson always sent him his new books and he read them as soon as they arrived. With wild ambition, he now planned three hundred illustrations, declaring whimsically:

  When the 300 drawings are done, I shall sell them for £18,000: with which I shall buy a chocolate coloured carriage speckled with gold, and driven by a coachman in green vestments and silver spectacles, – wherein, sitting on a lofty cushion composed of muffins and volumes of the Apocrypha, I shall disport myself all about the London parks …

  Perhaps he knew that his expansive plan was as much a fantasy as the cushion made of muffins. But he made many monochrome drawings in different sizes and tints over the next few years, and two sets of two hundred wash drawings, one small, a large postcard size, and one larger, ten inches by six. He still hoped that these could be reproduced for a book but to his deep disappointment, no reproduction process worked as he wanted: autotype was too uneven, lithography too feeble, photography too dark.

  The whole sequence had an elegiac note, beginning with four sunset scenes for the final verse of ‘Mariana’, the hour of her greatest hopelessness, when ‘the day/ Was sloping toward his western bower’. Several lines, like his favourite ‘Palms and temples of the South’ from ‘The Palace of Art’, had clusters of ten or more sketches, while ‘The Daisy’, inspired by the Tennysons’ visit to the Riviera, a poem that Lear felt ‘more than any other poem, presents a unbroken series of Landscape Portraits’, had eighteen views. Even closer to his heart was the poem written for himself, ‘To E.L., on his Travels in Greece’. For this he made nearly twenty different views, from the ‘sheets of summer glass’ of Lake Akhrida to Corfu and Kanchenjunga, and over and over again he drew Mount Athos, its peak above the woods, its monasteries perched on the cliffs.

  The drawings became an obsession, and he now conceived of his progress, and of the drawings themselves, as a kind of metamorphosis. When he started, at Clive Vale Farm in 1852, he had told Hunt that the drawings were ‘in the Egg state’. Then he had drawn larger versions, ‘caterpillars’. The detailed monochrome outlines he was working on now were ‘chrysalisses’ and eventually they would attain ‘their final or Butterfly Condition’. The ideal watercolours, which never emerged, were ‘perfect insects’. The lines and drawings hatched and swarmed around his mind. His eyesight was now poor and his diary was full of worry:

  ‘Athos – all things fair’, The Monastery of St Dionysius, Mount Athos

  it is plain that owing to my very defective sight wh. cannot work without a distinct outline, – I have to make that outline so dark that it interferes with the light & clearness of the drawing, all through its future progress. It seems nearly impossible that I can gradually achieve colour & form together … Just now, it is on the cards whether or not I give up this ‘cataract’ – the 1st A ‘finished’ drawing! – a pretty ‘kettle of fish!’ – as the pious Baboo wrote.

  With his sight in this state, he had to start with a fierce heavy outline that was hard to get rid of later. Yet many drawings, scratchy, thick or dark, are thrillingly evocative, almost abstract in their intensity. When he came to the line from In Memoriam, ‘A looming bastion fringed with fire’, one drawing of the Indian coast dispensed with outline altogether, becoming a Turner-like watercolour wash of fluid darkness against the sea with ghostly boats. His drawings translated Tennyson’s sonorous, flowing lines into studies of light and dark, shadow and moon, river and cataract, snow and fire, distance and dusk.

  ‘A looming bastion fringed with fire’, the Coast of Travancore, India

  The final Tennyson drawings were for ‘Enoch Arden’. Lear’s interest was not in Enoch’s return after his shipwreck and long years on the desert island, when he comes home to find his wife remarried and resolves nobly not to interfere, but in the castaway, the exile, the tropical island itself. The line he chose was ‘a mountain wooded to the peak’. His painting would show Enoch stranded on his homeward passage, like a lost migratory bird. In early 1877, when he was finishing his paintings of Kinchenjunga, Mount Timohorit and Kasr es Saàd, he told Fortescue: ‘I try to look forward to hard work as the only mode of living in comfort, and a vast semi-composition of Enoch Arden – together with an equally large Himalayan subject, are the dreams of the future – not altogether dreams though – since the designs are already made.’

  It was a vision of waiting, hoping, uncertainty. Fortescue was percipient. A few years later, when they were discussing life after death and how it seemed impossible for humanity to dispense with religion altogether, he told Lear, ‘There is religion in your big Enoch Arden and your 150 Tennysonian subjects.’

  The vast painting, which supposedly once hung in the Tennysons’ dining room, is now lost. Did he ever finish it? On 15 December 1881, he wrote, ‘At 8.30 the great c
ase with the Canvas for Enoch Arden, is announced to be at hand. Every one of my steps in life have been denounced as silly & insane; perhaps this huge affair will be more truly & reasonably so than any previous.’ A year later, when the young art student Henry Strachey admired Lear’s gallery, with its beautiful watercolours and great canvas of Mount Athos, he noticed that

  at the end of the gallery stood a huge canvas covered over with lines in squares, but with no drawing on it. This, he told me, was to be a picture of Enoch Arden on the desert island. My remark that this would be a great undertaking roused Mr Lear to declare warmly that an old man should never relax his efforts or fail to attempt great things because he was seventy.

  In September 1883 Lear told Holman Hunt that he was working on a string of pictures, including ‘a big Philae, & a bigger Athos & Bavella, & a biggissimo Enoch Arden’, and the following spring Dmitri held him on a chair while he worked on the upper part of the picture, changing the place of the figures and going over the outlines in umber and turpentine. His drawings and preliminary watercolours show a figure seated on a rock or wandering down a forest path. Tall trees arch above him, a tropical landscape runs to the sea and jagged mountains rise beyond.

  Enoch’s island drew on landscapes Lear had painted over and over again: the bays of Greece, the mountains of Albania, the palms of Egypt, the banyan trees of India. In one sketch a skein of birds skims above the trees and a doodle among foliage reveals itself to be a parrot looking on. It was almost a reworking of Ann’s portrait of him as a child in his Robinson Crusoe setting, a nonsense land like the Chankly Bore or the great Gromboolian plain. It was joyous as well as solitary. ‘The foreground of my large Enoch Arden picture’, he told Emily,

  Lear’s watercolour sketch for Enoch Arden’s Island

  is to be elaborately filled with all kinds of Ipomoeas, Passion-flowers etc. – The statistic-realistic idiot of this world will say, ‘Why these flowers are of different countries! By no chance whatever do they ever grow in one place!’ – On which the following discourse will occur.

  E.L. ‘Oh yes they do!’

  Critic ‘Where?’

  E.L. ‘Just 43 miles from the coast Enoch Arden’s ship was bound to.’

  Critic ‘And where then was that coast?’

  EL. ‘Exactly 43 miles from Enoch Arden’s Island.’

  Critic explodes into several bits. Artist grins.

  Enoch is alone, but he has hope. And the mountains and trees and flowers and birds surround him as he waits for a sail.

  41: ‘AS GREAT A FOOL AS EVER I WAS’

  Lear trotted around San Remo, sociable, gossipy, inquisitive. This was very much a border town, with French spoken in the cafes and Italian in the markets, and a stream of English visitors. Some were invalids, like Ralph Touchett in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, published that year, ‘spending a dull, bright winter beneath a slow-moving white umbrella’; others, like James’s Isabel Archer, were passing through, full of excitement, seeing San Remo as ‘the threshold of Italy, the gate’ to ‘a land of promise’.

  In the cold yet sunny winter of 1880–1, sitting comfortably in his library, Lear read in the Telegraph of blizzards and icy misery in England: ‘With such wretchedness existing, why am I in such luxury?’ He sent Frank a cheque for £5 for the poor of the London district where he was magistrate: ‘of course one “can’t afford” this, but if one is only to relieve others from one’s superfluities, that can’t be right. I have every comfort at present in all sorts of ways, & ought to help those who are wretched.’ He replanted his mandarin orange trees from the Villa Emily, filled the garden with flowers and gave nosegays to departing visitors – he was heartbroken when his young gardener, Giuseppe, died of suspected tetanus. But he rejoiced in fine weather, wide views, birdsong and music, books and good dinners. He made new friends, like Revd E. Carus Selwyn, headmaster of Liverpool College, whom he met in Monte Generoso and who became a regular correspondent, and the Watsons, for whom Lambi went to work: ‘Watson is certainly a very likeable & delightful man; his brother in law is vastly less so.’

  His letters were a lifeline, keeping him in touch with his many friends in England, and he still made careful notes of their arrival and his answers.

  Letters received, late 1880, with ‘A’ for answered

  He was overjoyed in May 1881 when Fortescue was made Lord Privy Seal – largely because of the name, which allowed many jokes and drawings. Fortescue’s return to government was tough. Gladstone had appointed him to help him pass the Irish Land Bill, but he also had to cope with Gladstone’s deal with the imprisoned Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, to allow Irish tenants to appeal for fair rent. Parnell was released from Kilmainham gaol after promising to co-operate and stop nationalist violence, but only four days after the ‘Kilmainham treaty’, two British officials were murdered in Phoenix Park in Dublin, causing great outrage in England. Lear sympathised with Fortescue’s difficulties over Ireland, and his letters were now full of a new, avid interest in politics. He became tangled over the ‘Eastern Question’, concerning Russian aggression towards the Ottoman Empire. When Britain stood back, remembering the Crimea and protecting Indian shipping lanes by occupying Suez rather than engaging Russia, Lear was horrified. In response to Northbrook’s comment that the Russian capture of Batumi on the Black Sea coast of Georgia might give them ‘more responsibility’, Lear noted, ‘Certainly – & such would be the case if you gave them Anglesea or the I of Wight.’ In his view, Gladstone, so fond of chopping down trees on his estate, was a reckless baboon:

  When ‘grand old men’ persist in folly

  In slaughtering men and chopping trees,

  What art can sooth the melancholy

  Of those whom futile ‘statesmen’ teaze?

  Fortescue declined to join in: ‘the old man’ was his boss, after all. Lear wrote apologetically about his outpourings, while jokingly elevating his nonsense from a fool’s cap to a mitre: ‘Should you be injuiced by contemplating the remarkable development of my “Political knowledge and aspirations” to offer me some lucrative place under Government, be assured that I will take nothing but the Chancellor of Exchequership, or the Archbishoprick of Canterbury.’

  He would never go back to Britain to see those friends. Young Lord Derby, who was always kind, invited him to come and stay and bring a ‘room full of work with you. There is space still at Knowsley for a few more of your drawings, though I have a pretty good stock already.’ Derby, however, was also realistic. When Lear asked if he could possibly send the rest of the money for the drawings, Derby wrote in his diary, ‘I offered to do this, & he is heartily welcome’, but, he thought,

  in a world where nothing succeeds like success he has done himself much harm by his perpetual neediness. An artist who is always asking his friends to buy a picture and often to pay for it in advance, makes outsiders believe that he cannot know his business, which in Lear’s case is certainly far from the truth. But he has been out at elbows all his life, and so will remain to the last.

  A couple of years later Lear apologised for swamping Derby with notices about his London show, which had been moved from Christie’s to Foord and Dickinson, acknowledging that the annual announcement about his gallery ‘is as much an Advertisement-universal as Eno’s Fruitsalt or Epp’s Cocoa’. It was not meant, he insisted, to be a ‘persistent request to my friends that they should buy more of my work, especially when their walls are pretty well covered’.

  He was fearful of seeming to sponge on his rich patrons, yet he went on shamelessly trying to sell his work, enclosing lists of pictures and prices in letters to likely buyers and reminding friends, if they had admired a painting, that it was for sale. But he did become more choosy about his open Wednesdays in San Remo. Constance Strachey, who went over to see him from Cannes, noticed that sometimes he answered the door himself, to keep out dreaded Germans and others: ‘If he did not like the appearance of a visitor, with a long face and woe in his voice he would explain t
hat he never showed his pictures now, being much too ill. He would then shut the door and his cheerfulness would return.’ He was fed up with crowds admiring his work and leaving without buying a thing. One guest he was keen to see, however, was Queen Victoria. In the spring of 1882 she spent a month in Menton, having fallen in love with the Riviera. Hanbury brought her baskets of flowers from La Mortola, and she drove along the Corniche road, enchanted by its grandeur and the sight of local shepherds with their white knee breeches and black hats. As she drew and sketched, perhaps she remembered Lear’s lessons nearly forty years ago. (A friend warned Lear against holding forth about Germans while she was there: ‘Says I, “I won’t if I can help it.”’) In the end the visit proved too complicated to arrange, although Giorgio allegedly made piles of macaroons, which they knew Victoria loved, and crowds of people came hoping to see her. The following summer, in Monte Generoso, a small elderly lady peered at him through the restaurant door, then sent her husband to enquire if he was really ‘Mr Lear’, as if so, ‘she would be glad to make your acquaintance again’. Lear was touched to find that it was the Princess Royal, ‘the most absolute duck imaginable’.