February Art: birds
Edward Lear is known for nonsense verse but he was one of the nineteenth century’s great observational artists, who despite his short sight became highly accomplished at detailed landscapes and naturalist’s drawings to go alongside his sketches and snatches of silliness. The period was obsessed with observing, studying, and classifying the natural world, and Lear’s early speciality was birds – no small matter as it was his collaborator John Gould’s observations of finches which kick-started Darwin’s theories.
Lear started with parrots, drawing them obsessively at the cages at Regent’s Park zoo in London (‘for twelve months I have so moved – looked at – & existed among Parrots – that should any transmigration take place at my decease I am sure my soul would be very uncomfortable in anything but one of the Psittacidae’). He developed the stone oil and water lithograph technique to turn his own drawings into huge hand coloured folio plates, before partnering with Gould in trips to Europe to include a wider aviary of owls and toucans. So much looking means that birds and backgrounds show the colour and character that later animates his verses, where companionable birds often feature: ‘There was an old Person of Nice, / whose associates were usually Geese…’. It’s hard to choose just one!
thebicyclops 