Edward Lear

Poet, painter and author of the Book of Nonsense, Edward Lear landed at Colombo in November 1874, aged sixty-two, during a fourteen-month journey through India at the Viceroy’s invitation. He found the island beautiful but the climate oppressive, yet sketched with compulsive industry, producing in under four weeks over seventy drawings and watercolours: breadfruit and jak trees, river scenes near Ratnapura with Adam’s Peak beyond, animated roads near Galle. Immediate and technically assured, and bearing his characteristic pencilled notes of colour and texture, his Ceylon works were never published in his lifetime, and rank with the best any artist made of the island.