Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU EDWARD LEAR: MOMENT TO MOMENT Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 9th September to 11th November

Edward Lear (1812-88) would have been saddened, as by so much in his life, by the way his posthumous reputation has come to value his hobby – nonsense verse and limericks – so much more highly than his other work.

On the other hand, this is partly his own fault. In her 1988 book on his travels in the Levant, Sarah Hayman wrote that he left ‘a visual and verbal record of foreign lands that was unique in his own time and possibly unequalled in any other’, and he was one of the most original artists of his day. He, though, dismissed his work as mere topography, and often he could not resist the inclusion of visual jokes and verbal puns in his drawings.

So still, for many people, he remains a writer of nonsense verse and limericks who, they may know, happened also to paint.

In 1958, there was an Arts Council exhibition, and in 1985 a major show at the RA – which had originally rejected his efforts to court it with huge oil paintings. Last year, the dealer Guy Peppiatt offered a selling show of watercolours, and now the Ikon Gallery bills its larger exhibition as ‘the first solely devoted to his sketches and landscape drawings’ over the length of his career.

Lear was un-self-confident, an asthmatic and an epileptic, a condition of which he was ashamed and tried to keep hidden. Problems with his eyes meant he had to abandon his brilliant early work painting birds and animals, and the uncertainties of the English climate led him to spend much of his life abroad.

Despite all infirmities, he was a determined traveller, preferring to travel on foot even in the roughest places, and his compulsion to work also kept him on

How pleasant to travel with Mr Lear (From top): Dehmyt, Egpyt, 1867; Maharraka, Egypt, 1867; A view near Doukades, Corfu, 1862

the move. As he wrote to a friend, ‘I HATE LIFE unless I WORK ALWAYS.’

His career bridged the gap between Grand Tourism and Cook’s Tourism, and the illustrated Journals he published of his travels – like David Roberts’s views in Spain and the Holy Land – caught the public mood perfectly. In effect, he was the inventor of the travel book. As his friend Lord Tennyson wrote: … all things fair, With such a pencil, such a pen, You shadow forth to distant men, I read and felt that I was there.

This show in Birmingham of some 60 works examines Lear’s working methods and demonstrates how his style was Janus-faced, looking back to the 18th century and forward to the 20th.