EXHIBITION: The bicentenary of the birth of Edward Lear will see works from private collections go on display for the first time during an exhibition at the Ashmolean.
The Oxford museum is home to the largest and
most comprehensive collection of his work in the UK, and this show
from September 20 to January 6 covers all aspects of his
career.
Among the 100 works of art, ranging from
early natural history illustrations and landscape sketches to the
nonsense drawings and verses he is widely known for, will also be
examples from the Bodleian Library.
Happy Birthday Edward Lear: 200 Years of
Nature and Nonsense presents his work
chronologically, including watercolours, oil paintings, manuscripts
and illustrated books.
More than 30 loans from private collections
and the University of Oxford's libraries bring together editions of
the books Lear illustrated early is his career, such as travel
books, natural history publications and the principal editons of
his nonsense books - including the very rare first one.
Lear (1812-1888) saw himself primarily as an
artist and the exhibition has watercolours of animals and birds,
sketches from Greece, Italy, Egypt, the Near East and India, and a
group of the Tennyson illustrations on which he spent the last 20
years of his life.
Oils include rarely-seen views of Beachy
Head, Venice and landscapes in the Near East, and the great view of
Jerusalem painted in 1865, now in the Ashmolean.
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