Edward Lear

Edward Lear ( born May 12, 1812 in Highgate, † January 29, 1888 in Sanremo ) was a British painter, illustrator and writer. Along with Lewis Carroll, he is considered one of the great masters of Victorian nonsense literature.

Life

Edward Lear was the twentieth child of the London dealer in securities Jeremiah Lear and his wife Ann. In his childhood, he made serious illness seizures by: With five or six years he suffered from epileptic seizures, a few years later from depressive episodes. Due to the bad speculations of his father in 1816, impoverished the family and the parents could no longer adequately care for their many children. Edward was therefore raised by his older sister, Ann, in whose household Edward pulled at the age of 15 years. To earn money, he tried his hand as an illustrator.

In June 1830 he began his work on Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, which were released in November and established his reputation as an ornithological draftsman. For a time he worked with John Gould. From 1832 to 1836 employed him Lord Stanley, president of the Zoological Society of London, as a draftsman at his country estate Knowsley Hall. Lear was a member of the nature-searching Linnean Society of London. In the following years Lear traveled through Europe and made ​​many more drawings.

1846 Lear published under the pseudonym Derry Down Derry his most famous work, A Book of Nonsense. In the same year he gave drawing lessons to Queen Victoria. Later he met Alfred Tennyson and William Holman Hunt. From 1855 to 1864 Lear lived apart from brief interruptions to the city was still under British protectorate Ionian island of Corfu. From there, he made ​​several trips to the nearby Ottoman Balkan provinces. Lear dabbled in oil painting, but found his landscapes no great applause. In February 1865 he released his first nonsense story, The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple - Popple. Two years later his first song nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat. The second volume of his poems, More Nonsense, was published in December, 1871. Since 1871 Lear lived in Sanremo, first in the Villa Emily, then since 1881 in the Villa Tennyson, where he died in 1888.

Work

Edward Lear was an illustrator of natural motifs. He is best known today, however, particularly as a writer of nonsense poems; his many limericks are classics of the genre. Lear's verses are characterized by a playful use of the word sound as well as by the total lack of meaning or punch line.