Edward Lear at Knowsley & ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’

13th Earl of Derby

Edward Lear (1812-88), who is most famous for his limericks and nonsense verse, was also a prolific landscape watercolourist, but he began his career as a zoological draughtsman of distinction. As a young man he spent much
of the period from 1831 to 1837 living and working at Knowsley under the patronage of Lord Stanley, later the 13th Earl of Derby. He painted extraordinary watercolours of the exotic animals in the menageries and aviaries in the Hall gardens, but also honed his skills as a humourist and caricaturist while entertaining the Earl’s grandchildren, when they were staying at the Hall. A few years later Lear decided that he wanted to travel for his health and become an accomplished landscape artist; the 13th Earl was among a small group of his family and friends who sponsored the young artist’s first long stay in Italy. During the following decades Lear remained in correspondence with the 14th and 15th Earls of Derby, both of whom commissioned oil paintings and collected landscape watercolours from the artist. The Derby Collection at Knowsley Hall to this day holds the outstanding collection of Lear’s early natural history drawings and a highly significant group of his landscape watercolours, both sketches and finished compositions, that were made throughout the artist’s long later career.

The Spectacled Owl is one of the many watercolours
of the 13th Earl’s animals, painted by Edward Lear.

Lord Stanley, who became the 13th Earl on the death of his father in 1834, was one of the most important natural historians and zoologists active in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. He was President both of the Linnean Society and the newly founded Zoological Society of London. It was there that he met the young Edward Lear, who was making drawings of the parrots, forty-two of which the artist published in a lavish folio volume, Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae (1832). As a result Lord Derby invited Lear to Knowsley to draw the exotic birds and animals that he had collected from all over the world, and which lived in specially designed aviaries and menageries. Lord Derby’s private zoo became the largest and most important of its type in Britain.

Lear worked at Knowsley intermittently for the next five years, concentrating all his energies on depicting living and dead specimens of animals in beautifully delineated and vividly coloured drawings that are now thought to be some of the finest natural history studies ever made, even rivalling the work of his famous American contemporary John James Audubon, who also visited Knowsley at this time and corresponded with the 13th Earl. A selection of the finest of Lear’s watercolours were published in 1846, faithfully lithographed by J. W Moore in the first of two volumes entitled Gleanings from the Menagerie and Aviary at Knowsley Hall, a work financed by Lord Derby and edited by John Gray of the British Museum, who also selected the plates and wrote the accompanying texts.

Apart from his extraordinary natural history watercolours, while living at Knowsley, Lear also entertained Lord Derby’s grandchildren, great-nephews and great-nieces in the Hall’s nursery after dinner. From this talent to amuse children the artist developed his skill to compose limericks and nonsense verse as well as drawing lively caricatures. A selection of these poems and drawings were published in 1846 in his ever popular Book of Nonsense, which since then has never been out of print. Later on Lear published further collections of nonsense poems and alphabets; perhaps his most famous verses are ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’.

In 1837 Lear’s eyesight began to suffer due to the close work needed to complete the highly accurate natural history drawings and watercolours. It is also thought that Lear wanted to escape from the oppressive presence of John Gould, an older illustrator based at the Zoological Society of London. Already developing a talent as a landscapist on tours of Ireland and the Lake District, Lear decided to tour Italy and record his travels in watercolours. Both Lord Derby and his nephew Robert Hornby generously sponsored Lear’s first extended visit to Rome and central Italy. For the rest of his life Lear travelled abroad, depicting landscapes and living mainly in Italy, as well as touring all across the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. On his visits back to England the artist usually re-visited Knowsley and later corresponded assiduously with the 13th Earl’s eldest son and grandson, the 14th and 15th Earls respectively, who both remained committed collectors and patrons of Lear’s landscape work. Looking back on his prolific and fulfilled life as an artist, despite his many health problems, Lear always spoke fondly of his time at Knowsley as the happiest years of his life; He was immensely proud of the fact that four generations of the Stanley family had been committed supporters of him as an artist.