Ashmolean Museum presents Happy Birthday Edward Lear. 200 Years of Nature and Nonsense, an exhibition on view 20 September 2012 – 6 January 2013.
Edward Lear (1812–1888), Monastery of Konstamonitou, 1856. Pen, brown ink and watercolour with bodycolour on buff paper, 29.7 x 45.7 cm© Private Collection, courtesy of Agnews
To celebrate the bicentenary of Edward Lear (1812–1888) the Ashmolean is holding an exhibition covering all aspects of his work. From early natural history illustrations and extraordinary landscape sketches, to the nonsense drawings and verses for which Lear is so well known, the exhibition draws on the Ashmolean’s own collection, one of the largest and most important in the UK, and includes significant loans from the Bodleian Library and private collections.
Edward Lear is one of the most notable artists and popular writers of the Victorian period. Although best known for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose, Lear saw himself primarily as an artist. ‘Happy Birthday Edward Lear’ presents his work chronologically, with watercolours, oil paintings, manuscripts, and illustrated books carefully selected to reflect every aspect of his artistic output. Among the highlights are watercolours of animals and birds; sketches made during his travels in Greece, Italy, Egypt and the Near East, and India; and a group of the Tennyson illustrations on which he spent the last twenty years of his life. Lear’s work as a painter in oils is represented by rarely seen evocations of Beachy Head, Venice, and landscapes in the Near East; and the great view of Jerusalem, painted in 1865, now in the Ashmolean.
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