Edward Lear (1812-1888)
Illustrated autograph letter signed (‘Edward Lear’) to Hallam Tennyson, Varese and Monte Generoso, 16 and 21 September 1880
Four pages, 210 x 130mm and 262 x 205mm, illustrated with a caricature of Lear as a bird standing on a cliff peering through an eyeglass at a mountain marked ‘Mte Rosa’. Provenance: Papers of Alfred Lord Tennyson: Sold by Order of the Trustees of the Tennyson Trust – Sotheby's, 21 & 22 July 1980, lot 396.

'In the Muddy Tooranian Sea, / Where the Fishes have eyes of wax, – / And the Whales stuff their Ears with American Cotton, / And Porpoises ride on their backs'. Lear muses poetically on the Dead Sea and gives a humorous account of a recitation by a donkey of ‘In Memoriam’. The letter opens with a humorous account of two workmen discussing the etymology of the Dead Sea whilst taking down his painting 'Masada, on the Dead Sea' ('ven I vos a sailor & vent all over the vorld, I vos in the Vhite sea, as varn't Vhite at all: – not the Red sea vorn't Red, nor the Black sea Black, nor the Muddy Tooranian Sea, as vornt muddy nohow, but, quite contrairy – all blue!'), and recounts an equally humorous anecdote setting his admiration for Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam against the story of 'a donkey down at Varese who one morning chose to read out some of the poem, quite apropos to nothing, & before a lot of people who were destinctly Swinish, & evidently understood nothing whatever of what he was reading, till, when he read – "The murmur of a happy Pan" – ... one of the audience suddenly said – "Ah! Yes!" – But I was convinced the only view of the subject in that man's mind was that the line meant the felicitous bubbling of eggs being fried’. Elsewhere Lear complains of the ‘immense glare’ of a five-storey hotel which has been constructed in front of his villa, making painting impossible ('Certainly, a more devilish injury was never inflicted by 2 English people & a Gerwoman on any unoffending artist'), updating Hallam on the progress of his Tennyson illustrations and his new villa (‘What do you think I am going to call my new Villa? Villa Tennyson’), musing on the differences between Greek and English landscape paintings (‘so curiously diversified a collection of topographical illustrations’), and requesting research from Hallam regarding places and figures from Greek mythology (‘Will you tell me the meaning of “Aeonian hills” ... Also is Sparta anywhere near?’).

Hallam, later 2nd Baron Tennyson (1852-1928) was the eldest son of Alfred, Lord Tennyson: he was named after the poet's close friend, Arthur Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam. The first page of this letter is reproduced by John Lehmann, Edward Lear and his World, 1977, p. 109.