Orientalism | Edward Lear (1812–1888)

Mavi Boncuk | 

Edward Lear (12 May 1812– 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularized. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals; making colored drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; and as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.

Edward Lear visited Macedonia in the autumn 1848. He actually traveled through Greece toward Constantinople, but his journey took an unexpected turn in the wild territory deep in the Ottoman empire. He passed through Ohrid, Prespa, Bitola, Debar and went forward deeper into Albania. 

His Macedonian trip is described in detail in his book “Edward Lear in Albania – Journals of a landscape painter in the Balkans” from 1851. The complete list of his Macedonian drawings and watercolors can be found in the Harvard University Library, Cambridge, MA, USA. 

Edward Lear, View of Ohrid, Macedonia.

Lear arrived in Constantinople in August 1848, still weak from an illness he had contracted in Greece. To help him recuperate, the British Ambassador and his wife, Sir Stratford and Lady Canning, invited him to stay at their residence at Therapia, and showed him the greatest hospitality, as Lear revealed in a letter to his sister, Ann: 'Lady Canning feeds me and spoils me in the kindest way possible.' (see Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear Selected Letters, 1988, p.84). In return, Lear gave drawing lessons to the Canning's three daughters, but rather than outstay his welcome he left Therapia on 1 September, and moved to the Hotel d'Angleterre at Pera, the European quarter of Constantinople. Feeling in better health, he began exploring the local sites and bazaars. He began to appreciate the beauty of Constantinople, and wrote in his journal: 'it is astonishing what a beautiful effect all the snow white domes and minarets have rising from the water; there can be no place so strange and lovely' (V. Noakes, op. cit., 1988, p. 86)

Lear immersed himself in the life of the busy city and hired a local guide ' ... and set out to explore the city, buying silks in the Stamboul bazaars, sampling the pastries and sweetmeats of the street vendors, and visiting the mosques and the Seraglio, the great walls and the vast champs de morts with the forests of cypresses and turbaned headstones.' (see S. Hyman, Edward Lear in the Levant, Travels in Albania Greece and Turkey in Europe, 1848-1849, 1988, p. 59).

The walls of Constantinople which stretch from the waters of the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara, were first built in the fifth century by Emperor Theodosius II, and resisted enemy attack for over seven hundred years until finally being breached by the Knights of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Repaired and re-strengthened they protected the city again until 1453, when the troops and cannons of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror brought sections crashing to the ground.

Lear painted this view of the imposing watchtowers from the dry riverbed below, which sweeps through the composition and gives the wonderful sense of space which we expect from Lear. The composition is balanced by cypresses on the left and the overgrown walls on the right which were not restored until recent times. A trio of Turkish women are walking towards the viewer dressed in the local dress and white yashmak, in Lear's words; 'the women look like a bed of tulips afar off – clothed in all colours; but near, that dreadful 'tooth ache' wrapper makes them look like ghosts. They all wear yellow boots... and they walk miserably, and as if crippled, and in fact, I should recommend them all to go to bed directly.' (V. Noakes, op. cit., 1988, p. 61)

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  Edward Lear | The Walls of Constantinople | signed with monogram l.r. | pencil and watercolour heightened with white