Lear, Edward

A magnificent ornithological watercolor by Edward Lear, "perhaps the best of all bird painters" (Great Bird Books).

When he was just sixteen—before his residence at Lord Stanley's Knowsley Hall and before his long but ultimately unsatisfying association with John Gould—Lear met and was employed by the naturalist John Prideaux Selby. "It is likely that Lear served an informal apprenticeship with Selby. If so, it was a fortunate training, for Selby demonstrated a bold and lively approach to his ornithological work which was ahead of his time, and which Lear was to develop with much skill in his later bird drawings" (Noakes 6). Lear's biographer Susan Chitty also credits Selby for advancing the young artist's draughtsmanship, noting that "under his influence Lear's birds grew large and lively" (pp. 19–20). 

Selby's folio publication revolutionized ornithological illustration in Great Britain. "Selby's bird figures were the most accurate delineations of British birds to that date, and the liveliest. After so many books with small, stiff bird portraits, this new atlas with its life-size figures and more relaxed drawing was a great achievement in the long history of bird illustration" (Jackson, p. 212). Of the 277 known surviving original watercolors for Illustrations of British Ornithology, the Great Auk is the only one by Lear. The majority of the drawings, 217, are by Selby himself, with fifty-five contributed by his brother-in-law, Robert Mitford, and four by Sir William Jardine.

A preliminary pencil drawing of Lear's Great Auk is in the collection of the Blacker-Wood Library, McGill University. This preliminary drawing is not signed; the present watercolor wash drawing based on the McGill sketch is signed by Lear and inscribed by Selby, who executed and signed the etched plate. The etching enlarges the primary figure while eliminating completely the detail of the head in the upper right corner of the watercolor.

Lear's particular affinity for portraying big birds has been often remarked on. "The large, monstrous, sinister and eccentric birds ... are among the most remarkable bird drawings ever made, and it is evident that Lear endowed them with some measure of his own whimsy and intelligence, his energetic curiosity, his self-conscious clumsiness and his unselfconcious charm" (Hyman, p. 45). Certainly Lear's wonderful Great Auk exhibits more than a hint of self-portraiture.