Edward Lear 1812-1888

Captain Lawson;
London, Thomas Agnew & Sons;
Private collection

Lear first visited Albania between September and November 1848 and his journey took him through some of the wildest countryside he had ever visited, recorded in his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania, published in 1851.  At the beginning of October he was in Scutari, on the frontier between Montenegro and Albania.  He stayed there for three days before turning back towards Berat, the fortress capital of Albania which lies close under the great Mount Tomohrit.  On the 16^th October he noted in his journal, ‘for the purpose of sketching Tomohr, I awoke and rose at three and at daylight the mountains sparkled like clear crystal’ (Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, 1851, p.195.)  He made a number of sketches of the mountain, and later painted an oil which was sold to Lady Ashburton in 1877.  Lear stayed at Berat for ten days before setting off, with an armed guard, on a week’s tour of Khimara, one of the wildest outposts in Europe.  From Khimara he travelled south and concluded his Albanian tour with a visit to Yannina.

Few foreigners visited Albania in the mid nineteenth century and Lear, who ventured there in 1848 with only his servant, Giorgio, described it as ‘a new world (which) charmed the eye.’  He was delighted by the wild, dramatic landscape and wrote of ‘a profusion everywhere of the most magnificent foliage recalling the greenness of our own island – clustering plane and chestnut, growth abundant of forest oak and beech, and dark tracts of pine.  You have majestic cliff-girt shores; castle-crowned heights, and gloomy fortresses; palaces glittering with gilding and paint; mountain passes such as you encounter in the snowy regions of Switzerland; deep bays and blue seas with bright, calm isles resting on the horizon; meadows and grassy knolls; convents and villages; olive-clothed slopes and snow-capped mountain peaks – and with all this a crowded variety of costume and pictorial incident such as  bewilders and delights an artist at each step he takes.’ (Edward Lear, Introduction to Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania, 1851; quoted by Susan Hayman, ed., Edward Lear in the Levant –Travels in Albania, Greece and Turkey in Europe, 1848-1849, 1988, p.72.)

His trip, however, was not without its hardships and the inhabitants, who were under Turkish dominion and Mohammedan by religion, were not only openly hostile to him as a Christian, but also as a painter.  They felt drawing was an evil practice, at Ochrida he was pelted with stones and sticks, at Tirana he was attacked by a Dervish and at Elbasson crowds surrounded him as he sat sketching with cries of ‘Shaitan scroo! Shaitan’ (‘The Devil draws! The Devil!’)  Despite the difficulties of his tour, however, he left Albania with regret ‘for an artist may go easily enough at any time of his life to Rome or the Rhine, Matlock, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Killarney or Calcutta, but Berat and Illyria are not easy places to revisit’ (op.cit., p.102).

The present oil appears to have been painted from sketches made in April 1857 when Lear returned to Albania for his second visit to see the places he had missed on his previous trip.