Past Perfect: The Ridiculous and the Sublime

The English landscape artist and doggerel poet Edward Lear hardly cut a dashing figure. He was large and ungainly—“as uncombative as a tender girl,” according to fellow painter William Holman Hunt—and plagued by asthma, epilepsy and depression. But he also possessed great wit and a childlike love of the absurd. Lear was born in 1812 near London, the 20th child in a family of 21 siblings. At the age of 19, he published a highly regarded volume of drawings, Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, which brought him to the attention of Lord Stanley, later the Earl […]