Lear Without Bosh

"It is queer," Edward Lear once wrote to a friend, "that I am the man as is making some three or four thousand people laugh in England all at one time. . . ." But to staid and sensible Victorians, who seemed to have a safety-valve passion for nonsense, there was nothing queer about it. Edward Lear's volumes of limericks, his world of Jumblies, scroobious snakes, runcible spoons and Dongs with Luminous Noses, set English gentlemen roaring into their port and schoolkids giggling into their bedtime hot milk.

"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!" he once wrote in an autobiographical verse, and most eminent Victorians would have agreed. Critic John Ruskin put him "first of my hundred authors." Solemn statesmen referred to his Books of Nonsense in Parliament. "Sich," sighed Lear to his Learishly spelled diary, "is phame."

It was not the sort of phame that Edward Lear was after. A shy, pear-shaped six-footer with a bulging nose and "a beard that resembles a wig," he was a melancholy bachelor who could "blubber bottlesful" over Tennyson's poems. The son of a bankrupt, he began painting for his living at 15. It was as a painter, and not as a writer of "bosh," that he wished to be known.

Delhicate Delhi. In time, he became one of England's most prolific landscapists. His epilepsy (the attacks of "the Terrible Demon" were recorded in his diary with little x's) made him restless, drove him and his sketchbook on continuous travels, from "Foggopolis" (his name for London) to the Continent, to the Near East, and finally to making "Delhineations of Delhicate" Delhi. He was constantly seasick, was pelted with sticks & stones by irate Albanians, was bitten by "a centipede of some horror" in Greece, lived "on rugs and ate with gypsies . . . and performed frightful discrepancies for 8 days" in the Balkans. Like most Englishmen abroad, he grumbled continually. The Bosporus was "the ghastliest humbug going," Corfu was a "tittletattle, piggy-wiggy island," and Venice was filled with palaces, pigeons, poodles, pumpkins, and--"to keep up the alliteration"--pimps.

Nose-Grinding. Through all his grumbles and rising gorges, Edward Lear painted furiously. He rose before dawn, trudged about all day until he found a landscape that pleased him. Then, after myopically surveying the scene over his spectacles, he began his hasty sketches on odd-shaped scraps of paper from his notebook. His watercolor sketches were meant mostly to be notes for his fastidious and stilted oils, over which he labored long and hard ("I hate the act of painting. . . . It is like grinding my nose off!"). A few of the oils rode into the Royal Academy on the coattails of the Pre-Raphaelites. No coattails can carry them now.

Last week, 60 years after Edward Lear and his faithful old cat-traveling companion Foss died, Manhattan galleryites got a chance to judge Edward Lear the artist through his spontaneous sketches. "Oh, dear, dear, dear," Lear once wrote, "the more I see of nature, the more sure I am that one Edward Lear should never have attempted to represent her. Yet . . . I know there is a vein of poetry in me that ought to have come out." If anywhere it did come out, fresh & free, it was in the pale and delicate watercolors he jotted down in a few feverish moments.

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