Edward Lear British, 1812-1888

John Scandrett Harford (1785-1866)

Lear first travelled to Athens in the Spring of 1848. He was accompanied by Sir Stratford Canning, the British Ambassador in Turkey, and his wife, Lady Canning, whom he had met on Corfu. He remained there for the first two weeks of June before continuing his travels through Greece and moving on to Turkey at the end of July.

On arrival Lear was immediately impressed by the beauty of the city and wrote to his sister Ann, ‘…surely never was anything so magnificent as Athens! – far more than I could have had any idea of. The beauty of the temples I well knew from endless drawings – but the immense sweep of the plain with exquisitely formed mountains down to the sea – and the manner in which that huge mass of rock – the Acropolis – stands above the modern town with its glittering white marble ruins against the deep blue sky is quite beyond my expectations.’ (see Vivian Noakes, Edward Lear – Selected Letters, 1988, p.  76).

Lear returned to Greece in 1849 and was equally impressed by the classical sites he had seen the previous year. In particular, he admired the Acropolis and described it to Ann as ‘really the most astonishing monument of a great people I have ever seen. Poor old scrubby Rome sinks into nothing by the side of such beautiful magnificence. No words can give any idea of the appearance of such a vast mass of gigantic ruins all of dazzling white marble, of the most exquisite proportions – and overlooking such splendid tracts of landscape’ (ibid.)

The Acropolis provided Lear with inspiration throughout his life and he made a number of detailed drawings of it including the present work and a watercolour entitled The Temple of Jupiter Olympus, Athens, The Acropolis Beyond which was sold in these Rooms on 13th November 1997 for £28,000.

The present watercolour is dated twice which suggests that it was drawn on the spot on 8th April 1849 and completed later when the artist was back in England in 1854. At some stage after this it was acquired by the artist’s friend, John Scandrett Harford. Harford was born in 1785 and is perhaps best known as the biographer of Michelangelo. He was also a close friend of William Wilberforce and of Sir Thomas Lawrence, by whom he was painted. He possessed a great interest in art and literature and during his visits to Paris and other cities in 1815-17 he laid the foundation of a valuable collection of pictures which adorned the walls of Blaise Castle. In 1812 he married Louisa, the eldest daughter of Richard Hart Davis, M.P., for Bristol and he died on 16th April 1866.