Edward Lear

Lear’s trip to Palestine was one of the more harrowing of his foreign journeys, as he and his companions were surrounded on the road by two feuding tribes, each demanding payment for passage through their lands. Of Jerusalem, Lear wrote in a letter that he found “enough . . . to set a man thinking for life,” even though its filth made it the “foulest and odiousest place on earth.” He evocatively described the color of the landscape outside of the city as “ham in stripes.” Like many of Lear’s works, this watercolor was only begun in situ. Lear left Jerusalem on April 2, 1858, completing and inscribing the sheet elsewhere in late April.