Sir
Roderick Murchison used to say that he always understood the geological
peculiarities of a country he had only studied in Lear's sketches. The
compliment was thoroughly justified; and it is not every landscape-painter
to whom it could honestly be paid.
The history of Lear's choice of a career was a curious one. He was the
youngest of twenty-one children, and, through a family mischance, was
thrown entirely on the limited resources of an elderly sister at a very
early age. As a boy he had always dabbled in colors for his own amusement,
and had been given to poring over the ordinary boys' books upon natural
history. It occurred to him to try to turn his infant talents to account;
and he painted upon cardboard a couple of birds in the style which the
older among us remember as having been called Oriental tinting, took them
to a small shop, and sold them for fourpence. The kindness of friends, to
whom he was ever grateful, gave him the opportunity of more serious and
more remunerative study, and he became a patient and accurate zooelogical
draughtsman. Many of the birds in the earlier volumes of Gould's
magnificent folios were drawn for him by Lear. A few years back there were
eagles alive in the Zooelogical Gardens in Regent's Park to which Lear could
point as old familiar friends that he had drawn laboriously from claw to
beak fifty years before.
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