Edward lear death

Edward Lear 12 May [ 1 ] [ 2 ] — 29 January was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks , a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals, making coloured drawings during his journeys which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books and as a minor illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson 's poems.

As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway , North London, the penultimate of 21 children and youngest to survive of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker formerly working for the family sugar refining business.

Jeremiah Lear ended up defaulting to the London Stock Exchange in the economic upheaval following the Napoleonic Wars. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother to him until her death, when he was almost 50 years of age. Lear had lifelong health problems. From the age of six, he had frequent grand mal epileptic seizures , bronchitis , asthma and, during later life, partial blindness.

Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate when with his father. The event scared and embarrassed him. He felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition, and his adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view. When Lear was about seven years old he began to show signs of depression, possibly due to the instability of his childhood.

What is edward lear famous for

He had periods of severe melancholia which he referred to as "the Morbids". Lear was already drawing "for bread and cheese" by the time he was aged 16 and soon developed into a serious "ornithological draughtsman" employed by the Zoological Society and from to by the Earl of Derby , who kept a private menagerie at his estate, Knowsley Hall.

He was the first major bird artist to draw birds from life rather than the skins of specimens.