Edward Lear, Autograph Letter Signed, ‘Edward Lear’, Villa Tennyson, [Sanremo, Italy], Monday, no date, 1880s, to Mrs Kettlewell.

‘I stupidly forgot both the other evening and yesterday morning to send the Italian novels you or Miss Wedgwood wanted. The 3 I now send are all I can find. I hope Mr. Kettlewell’s gut was not made worse by the mutton broth: if so, we will try another sort of soup later on.’

Partially toned, 1 page of a bifolium, 16mo.

The Saleroom.

Edward Lear, A Street Scene in Vevey, Switzerland.
Watercolour, inscribed and dated 1837, 28cm x 18cm, within a stained wood frame.

Provenance
Christie’s 8th July 1997, lot no.76.

Edward Lear, A view of Villa Barberini, Albano, near Rome.
Signed and dated ‘Edward Lear. del. 1846.’ (lower centre) and inscribed ‘Villa Barberini. / Albano.’ (lower left). pen and brown ink, brown wash on buff paper. 5 7⁄8 x 18 ¼ in. (15 x 46.5 cm.)

Provenance
with Agnew’s, London (105th Annual Exhibition of Watercolours and Drawings, January-February 1978, no. 205).

Christie’s.

Edward Lear, A view of Eremo di Camaldoli, Frascati, near Rome.
Signed and dated ‘Edward Lear del. 1846.’ (lower right) and inscribed ‘Camaldoli. / Frascati.’ (lower left). Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with touches of white on buff paper. 6 ¼ x 17 ¾ in. (16 x 45 cm.)

Provenance
With Agnew’s, London (105th Annual Exhibition of Waterclours and Drawings, January-February 1978, no. 213).

Lear first travelled to Italy in 1837, and enjoyed regular and prolonged visits across the country over the following decade, culminating in his 1846 publication ‘Illustrated excursions in Italy’. For another Italian view by Lear, see lot 269.

Christie’s.

Edward Lear, Philae.
monogrammed lower right. oil on paper laid on canvas. 34cm x 54cm.

Provenance
With Agnew’s, London, no. 32992;
The Collection of Sir Thomas William Evans, Bt., of Allestree Hall, Derbyshire, and Dartmouth House, Queen Anne’s Gate, London;
Miss S. Sorley; Sotheby’s, London, 19 November 1969, lot 167;
Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, London, 10 July 1991, lot 88;
Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art, Christie’s, London, 17 June 2014, lot 73;
Private collection, Sussex

The Saleroom.

Previously.

Edward Lear, A view of the Temple of Karnak at sunset, Thebes, Egypt.
Signed with monogram (lower right) and inscribed ‘Karnak. Thebes. Egypt’ (verso). Pencil, pen and brown ink and watercolour, heightened with white on paper. 4 ¼ x 8 1⁄8 in. (10.8 x 20.6 cm.)

Provenance
J. F. Tillotson.
Anonymous sale; Christie’s, London, 20 November 1984, lot 172.
Anonymous sale; Christie’s, London, 12 April 1994, lot 174.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, London, 4 July 2018, lot 222.

Lear first visited Egypt in January 1849, when he saw only Cairo and the Pyramids. The artist returned to Egypt at the end of 1853, arriving in Cairo that December. Immediately after Christmas, he received an invitation to journey up the Nile and embarked on a trip that took him as far south as Philae before he began his return journey on 8 February. A week later the boat arrived at Luxor, where Lear spent ten days exploring Karnak and the ruined temples at Thebes.

Christie’s.

Edward Lear, Kom Ombos, Egypt.
Signed with monogram (lower right) and indistinctly inscribed and dated ‘Ombos 1856’ (lower left). Oil on canvas laid down on board. 10 x 15 ½ in. (25.4 x 39.3 cm.)

See watercolour.

Provenance
Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook (1826-1904), Stratton Park.
The Estate of Ray Livingston Murphy (1923-1953); Christie’s, London, 22 November 1985, lot 76.
with Agnew’s, London.
The Nicolette Wernick Collection; Christie’s, London, 16 June 2010, lot 84, where purchased by the present owner.

Exhibited
London, Walker’s Galleries, Edward Lear 1812-1888: An Exhibition of some Paintings and Drawings, 1 – 21 June 1950, no.1, as ‘Nile – Kom Ombos’.
Springfield, Massachusetts, George and Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, 19th Century English Art from the Collection of Harold and Nicolette Wernick, 1988, no. 63.

Lear had settled back in London during the 1850s and became friends with the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Holman Hunt. He and Hunt decided to make a trip together to the Middle East, and on 6 December 1853, Lear set out on his own, with Hunt due to follow later. Lear returned to London the following year with a collection of drawings made on the trip. A watercolour of exactly the same view of the Kom Ombos Temple dated February 1854 exists, so the present oil must have been painted after his return to London and based on the watercolour. In 1848 Lear met Thomas Baring, later Earl of Northbrook, in Rome, and he became one of Lear’s closest friends for the rest of his life.

Christie’s.

Edward Lear, Samos, 6pm, 2 May 1863.
Inscribed lower right. Pen, ink and watercolour. 31 x 52cm.

The Saleroom.

My transcript:

65. Oxford Terrace.
24th 23d

Dear Mrs George,
Thanks for your letter of this morning, & pray thank Maria for the Fez, wh: has just come safely. — It’s a duck of a Fez, & shall be stuck on my inkstand, tho’ as I never wiped a pen in all my life, I cannot begin now!
I cannot write more, being sadly busy.
Take care what you write with your tables! — one of those animated critters pursued a young lady with the utmost vehemence upstairs the other day, & it required the efforts of 3 policemen to take it away! — so —
<picture>
& another was seen sitting on the window-seat at Belgrave Square, with its arms folded looking at the moon — so
<picture>
& 3dly — 4 ladies in a school near here have gone clean mad at finding all their tables dancing violently on the lawn before the houe. —
<picture>
I wish there were better accounts of George: — my love to him, & all of you. & believe me
always yours very sincerely (turn over
Edward Lear

My sister Harriet has come to England –: I went to Epsom — (Ellen’s) to see her yesterday) –: we had not met for 14 years.
She aint altered a _bit_: — but she says she could not have known me at all — & that I am not the least resembling what I was.

The post-scriptum asllows us to date the letter exactly, Lear mentions vsiting his sister Harriet in his diary for 23rd August 1858 when he finds her “looking ill,” so this letter was written on 24th. She would die less than a year later, as he mentions in his diary entry for 25 July 1859.

The Bonhams description quoted below also incorrectly states that it is addressed to “a close family friend… with the moniker of Charles Dickens’s famous comedic creation—Mrs. Gamp,” while actually it begins “Dear Mrs. George,” probably George Scrivens’s wife, so no reference to Dickens is present in the text. In addition they write that the meeting with Harriet took place in “Strowan” while, as the diary entry makes clear, he saw her in Epsom.

Bonhams.

Edward Lear illustrated autograph letter.
LEAR, EDWARD. 1812–1888. Autograph Letter written under a playful Dickensian pseudonym (“Dear Mrs. Gamp”), profusely illustrated with three original pen-and-ink nonsense drawings by Lear satirizing the Victorian “table-turning” spiritualism craze. 65 Oxford Terrace, London, Wednesday 23rd [c. 1853] 4 pages, written across a single folded bifolium of cream wove paper, 8vo (180 x 113 mm). Featuring a famous personal declaration regarding his writing process and three highly characteristic nonsense illustrations integrated into the text body, light vertical and horizontal folding creases.

A PREMIER EXEMPLAR OF VICTORIAN NONSENSE LITERATURE: AN ILLUSTRATED AUTOGRAPH LETTER BY EDWARD LEAR CAPTURING THE ARTIST AT HIS SATIRICAL AND VISUAL BEST.

While Edward Lear’s illustrated correspondence to close confidants like Chichester Fortescue and the Tennyson family is celebrated in institutional collections, privately held letters containing multiple, fully developed narrative sketches are scarce on the market. This complete four-page letter captures the “King of Nonsense” using both his literary wit and his distinct graphic line to savage the massive spiritualist craze of “table-turning” that captivated London drawing rooms during the 1850s.

Writing to a close family friend whom he addresses with the moniker of Charles Dickens’s famous comedic creation—Mrs. Gamp—Lear begins by acknowledging a miniature gift sent by a mutual acquaintance named Maria. The gift, a novelty fabric “Fez” designed to serve as a Victorian pen-wiper, prompts an heavily underlined declaration that serves as a cornerstone piece of personal trivia regarding Lear’s chaotic artistic process:”…[it] shall be stuck on my inkstand, tho’ as I never wiped a pen in all my life, I cannot begin now!” The letter swiftly transitions into a tour de force of Lear’s signature surrealism as he turns his sights on the contemporary fad of séances and moving furniture, detailing a series of fictional accounts where local tables have become sentient, wild “animated critters.”

To complement his narrative, Lear executes three pen-and-ink doodles directly into the text layout:

The Fleeing Lady: A dramatic sketch illustrating a narrative report where a rogue parlor table “pursued a young lady with the utmost vehemence upstairs… and it required the efforts of 3 policemen to take it away!

“The Lunar Spectator: A charming, anthropomorphized drawing of a three-legged circular table with a fully realized, smiling human face resting contentedly on a bench (“sitting on the window-seat in Belgrave Square, with its arms folded looking at the moon”).

The Dancing Academy: A kinetic chorus line of four stick-legged tables dynamically kicking their limbs into the air, illustrating a local rumor of a ladies’ school gone “clean mad at finding all their tables dancing violently on the lawn before noon.”

On the final page, Lear rounds out the correspondence by shifting to an intimate biographical update. He writes from “Strowan” to report an emotional family reunion with his beloved sister Harriet after a fourteen-year separation, noting with moving self-deprecation that while she had not altered at all, “she says she could not have known me at all — & that I am not the least resembling what I was.”

Edward Lear, Roman Campagna.
Late 1830s or early 1840s. Pencil, ink and watercolour. 13.5 x 21cm (5¼ x 8¼in.)

MutualArt.