#edward lear

[lionofchaeronea]

River Pass between Barren Rock Cliffs, Edward Lear, 1867

[a-book-of-creatures]

The heraldic cat reminded me of Edward Lear’s drawings of his cat Foss

[laclefdescoeurs]

View of Janina, Edward Lear

[arthistoryanimalia]

For #InternationalTigerDay 🐅 on #Caturday:

“Tigerlillia Terribilis” from Edward Lear’s Nonsense Botany (1871–77)

[thestuffedalligator]

Here is a totally unprompted, baseless, and useless crackpot theory.

In the poems The Jumblies and The Dong with the Luminous Nose by Edward Lear, Lear describes the Jumblies as having “sky-blue hands and sea-green hair,” and most artists — including Lear himself — would draw them as little humanoid gremlin creatures.

I think he was describing blue and gold macaws.

Blue and gold macaws have blue wings and a prominent green crest on their heads. “Their heads are green, their hands are blue, and they went to sea in a sieve.”

And here’s another fact: Edward Lear was famous for painting parrots. He published an entire book of parrots painted by studying live examples at the London Zoo and from private collections, including the blue and gold macaw.

Which means he definitely studied them in person before he wrote the poem.

Does any of this mean anything? Absolutely not, but you should read some of Edward Lear’s nonsense poetry because he was writing his own private poetic universe and characters and concepts he would describe in one poem would be expanded in others. The Dong is connected to the Jumblies and the Quangle Wangle Quee, which in turn connects him to the Pobble Who Has No Toes, and his name is the Dong.

[rearte2]

by Edward Lear, 1832

[calabria-mediterranea]

Reggio Calabria (Calabria, Italy) in a 19th century painting by Henry Jaeckel.

"Reggio is indeed one vast garden, and doubtless one of the loveliest spots to be seen on earth. A half-ruined castle, beautiful in colour and picturesque in form, overlooks all the long city, the wide straits, and snow-topped Etna volcano on the island of Sicily beyond."

- Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, 1852

Henry Jaeckel, Aragonese Castle of Reggio Calabria with view of the Mount Aetna and Sicily, 1853

[lindahall]

Edward Lear – Scientist of the Day

Edward Lear, an English nature artist and poet, was born May 12, 1812.

read more...

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

«Manypeeplia Upsidownia»

Edward Lear (1812-1888), Nonsense Botany

[byneddiedingo]

The Letter C of the Alphabet

Edward Lear, 1880

[elyaqim]

A clothed Duck wearing a hat and smoking a cigar, 1889.

☞ Illustration by William Foster for “The Duck and the Kangaroo,” Nonsense Drolleries, by Edward Lear, 1889. (In the public domain.)

Downloaded from the Internet Archive.

[lionofchaeronea]

Taormina and Mount Etna, Edward Lear, 1882

[vintageterror]

[laclefdescoeurs]

Jerusalem, 1858, Edward Lear

[arthistoryanimalia]

Edward Lear was born #OTD (12 May 1812 – 29 January 1888). #BookRecommendations:

The Natural History of Edward Lear, New Edition (2021)

The Parrots: Die Papagein - Les Perroquets: 1830-1832 - Edward Lear: The Complete Plates (2018)

Edward Lear's Nonsense Birds (2013)

[trusswork]

childhood play

The child who plays privately by themselves is trying to achieve something -- this general fact may be difficult to discern, or easy to forget, and it is almost impossible to see what particular thing the child is trying to do, because it is so inward and dependent on an unseen world. Nevertheless, when a child plays alone, just as much as or even more than when they play with others, they are trying to make something come right. Thus a child can become frustrated with a doll or a toy all by him or herself, and this will often have nothing to do with some physical problem (eg, balancing blocks, or making a train go - those are achievements of a cruder kind). There is simply something that the child wants to happen, is causing to happen, or sees happening or potentially happening in their play, the animation or retreat of some part of the play's world. A truck can very tragically fail to be in the right place, no matter their efforts; a stuffed bear can fail to be quite as near or far from a child's heart as the child desires at that moment; and this can end in tears that seem to come from nowhere. (Maurice Sendak's Kenny's Window shows this happening better and more truly than perhaps any other book.) A particularly sensitive child may find these same problems enacted in play with more abstracted toys such as sticks, rocks, pieces of string, paper, and so on. An extremely sensitive child will see the whole world as animate and frustrating in this way.

John and Faith Hubley's 1958 animation “Cockaboody,” set to audio of the couple’s children playing, emphasizes this world of the shifting, sometimes uncooperative toys and invisible companions. In a different way, it reminds me of Tove Janssen’s Moomins books; the child, Moomintroll, changes his moods to himself easily; or completely forgets about something he is preoccupied with, and then later remembers it and is just as enthusiastic as ever.

Edward Lear’s poem “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” set by composer Elena Langer and premiered by the BSO, March 2024: as Langer notes, it is a nonsense poem taken very earnestly and set accordingly, by a writer and artist whom Langer compares to Shelley or Byron. Before that, the orchestra played Ravel's Mother Goose suite, and it made me think how precisely symphonic childhood can be in our time -- between toys, records, stuffed animals and dolls, weather and seasons, other children and grown ups, rooms in a house, and so on -- in growing up, there seem to be fewer such simultaneous ingredients in life sometimes.

"The Noontime Witch," this dark middle European fairy tale in a setting by Dvorak -- on the same BSO program -- seems to reveal more about motherhood than many such tales: the intense, overflowing frustration with a child, the furious need to protect it, and the danger of protecting it too much.