Edward Lear

This finished composition is based on a sketch Lear executed in 1854, on his first trip to Egypt. Typically, patrons would visit Lear’s studio and choose a composition that suited their taste from among his notebooks of sketches. Like most of Lear’s studio watercolors, this painting incorporates opaque gouache, and it contains no specifics about time and place. The bold pinks and purples seen here were a distinctive feature of Lear’s studio works, which were intended to hold their own next to oil paintings. Lear found making works such as this (as opposed to his onsite sketches) tedious, and complained in his diary of his labors, “Grinding aching sorrows burn me—thinking of days of freedom & happy beautiful places.”