Great and varied as the merits of his pictures are, Lear hardly succeeded
in achieving any great popularity as a landscape-painter. His work was
frequently done on private commission, and he rarely sent in pictures for
the Academy or other exhibitions. His larger and more highly finished
landscapes were unequal in technical perfection,--sometimes harsh or cold
in color, or stiff in composition; sometimes full of imagination, at others
literal and prosaic,--but always impressive reproductions of interesting or
peculiar scenery. In later years he used in conversation to qualify himself
as a "topographical artist;" and the definition was true, though not
exhaustive. He had an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the
character and beauty of distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky
gorges, the majesty of a single mountain rising from a base of plain or
sea; and he was equally exact in rendering the true forms of the middle
distances and the specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various
lands through which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures
show a mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of
painting an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away
from the eye of the spectator until it is lost in a dim horizon.
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