Edward Lear

In addition to being a writer, Edward Lear was also an artist and an avid traveler. Lear produced many sketches during his travels, adding descriptions of the scenery, color notations, and other information to prompt his memory when he returned to his compositions later. In this scene, he notes the “sandy green rocky slope” at the far left, the “blue gray” of the water in the middle distance, and a more general impression of the landscape as “dim–pale–misty–immense” at lower left.

Lear was more than sixty years old when Lord Northbook, viceroy of India, invited him to tour India at his expense. Lear’s immediate reaction upon arriving in Bombay was one of “violent and amazing delight” at the “colours, & costumes, & myriadism of impossible picturesqueness!,” yet Lear made few pictures of the cities or people of India. He instead preferred the more tranquil scenes he found on his long and exhausting journey down the western Malabar coast. In the French protectorate of Mahé, he drew this scene from the vantage point of a ruined fort once belonging to the Sultan Tippoo Sahib. Lear’s host in the region was one Captain Baudry, whose name appears at the bottom center of the drawing.