Art market
Buyers will welcome a rare exhibition of the nonsense writer’s drawings
THERE was a time, somewhere in the late 1970s, when Edward Lear was the most expensive Victorian painter, thanks to a vast canvas that had made perhaps £250,000. As I recall, it was one of a group he did of Corsican mountain forests and there was much astonishment from the press, who hadn’t realised that Lear was an artist as well as a writer of nonsense verse. My own reaction was that he was a much more interesting watercolourist than oil painter.
Two large collections of Lear drawings came onto the London art market in 1929 from the families of his patrons Franklin Lushington and Lord Northbrook; they have fed collectors and museums ever since. Although there was a major Royal Academy exhibition in 1985, and bicentenary celebrations in 2012 at the Ashmolean and in Corfu, there does not seem to have been a selling show for many years.
Now, Guy Peppiatt has brought one together online (www.peppiattfineart.co.uk). There are 29 watercolours and drawings, together with four original illustrations for the poem that Tennyson dedicated to the artist in 1853. Two pen drawings illustrate limericks. Prices range from £1,950 to £30,000.
Lear (1812–88) was a professional artist for his whole life and his first strength was as an ornithological draughtsman, employed by the Zoological Society and then the Earl of Derby, for the amusement of whose children he first composed and illustrated verse such as The Owl and the Pussycat. With David Roberts, he could be said to have popularised the beautifully illustrated travel book.
His large oil paintings are very much of their period, but the landscape watercolours are especially interesting because they look back to 18th-century
innovators such as Francis Towne, as well as forward to pastoral revivalists in the 1930s. Unlike the majority of his professional contemporaries, Lear produced wash drawings— strong pen outlines tinted with colour. Pencil and pen outlines were often done on the spot and his quirky jottings to indicate colours are an added enjoyment.
Unlike Lear, Harold Frederick Pepper left little trace on the art world, at least until February 17, when Lockdales of Martlesham, Suffolk, offered 144 of his wooden carvings. Pepper was born in 1896 or 1897 in Ipswich and was a cabinetmaker. His father, a lawyer’s clerk, had some art training and his grandfather was a sailor, which may have influenced his choice of retirement hobby. He took to researching famous and infamous mostly East Anglian characters and carving 12in-high figures of them on plinths that record their histories.
There were giants (such as John Myddleton the Lancashire Giant, 1578–1623, 9ft 3in) and dwarves (Jeffrey Hudson, naturally), strong men and women, highwaymen
The landscape watercolours are especially interesting
and pirates, misers and the egregiously unwashed, saints and murderers, Rokewood the Gunpowder Plotter and Matthew Hopkins the Witchfinder General, freaks of nature and blind folk, such as Margaret Mcavoy, a Liverpudlian who died in 1820—‘with the aid of her fingers she was able to identify the colour of any material, to read print and tell the time through the glass of a watch’. There were also carved reliefs illustrating such sentiments as ‘The Hurrier I Go, the Behinder I Get’.
The figures were lotted in twos, threes and fours with estimates of about £50; the total was expected to be £3,000, but so enthusiastic were the mostly private bidders that it produced £18,240. Most expensive, at £3,404, were the two fattest men of 18th-century England. The 52st 11lb Daniel Lambert (1770– 1809) is well remembered. He adorns a cross-country fence at Burghley Horse Trials; his clothes and chair are displayed at Newarke Houses Museum in Leicester, where he was keeper of the gaol, and his portrait was painted by Benjamin Marshall.
His predecessor, Edward Bright of Maldon, Essex (1721– 50, 43st 7lb), may be less familiar. He did not attract a painter of
Marshall’s standing, but, six weeks before he died, he was sketched by an otherwise obscure local artist called David Ogborne and a line engraving and a mezzotint by James Mcardell were based on the drawing. Although Bright is shown in the prints bareheaded and with his waistcoat gaping, Pepper carved him in a tricorn hat with buttoned waistcoat. I happen to have what I believe is Ogborne’s original drawing, in which he appears as Pepper showed. My late mother-in-law probably bought it in Suffolk, so perhaps the carver knew it.
Next week NFTS or ENA?