ART REVIEW : Now There Once Was an Artist Named Lear . . .

Time was when the limericks of British artist Edward Lear were taught to every kid in the English-speaking world. Along with the stories and verses of Lewis Carroll, Lear’s illustrated rhymes confirmed every child’s suspicion that much of life is nonsense. His “The Owl and the Pussycat” was a particular favorite since it affirmed the silliness of that weird adult obsession, “love.”

Recent advances in illiteracy have probably cut down the size of Lear’s audience. All the same, it’s good to be reminded both of the art that made him a household name and the art that didn’t. The occasion is a small exhibition at the Huntington organized by its art gallery director, Edward Nygren.

It’s titled “The Worlds of Edward Lear 1812-1888,” because Lear was more than one kind of artist. The son of a London stockbroker, he worked as a draftsman at the city’s famous Zoological Garden, which led him to natural-history illustration. Examples on view like “African Gray Parrot” are precise, relaxed and vivid, probably because he drew directly from live animals. An expert of the day thought they were better than Audubon’s, and Lear was asked to illustrate two volumes of “The Naturalist’s Library,” as well as give drawing lessons to Queen Victoria.

His illustrative draftsmanship is still impressive today, but it doesn’t give modern eyes half the pleasure of some casual little sketches satirizing his own naturalist work. One uses the forms of bottles, forks and spoons to make an imaginary plant he called “Bottlephorkia Spoonifollia.” Such images should assure him a place as a precursor of Surrealism.

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By 1837, Lear had cultivated a patron in the person of Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby. Apparently most of Lear’s nonsense art was originally produced as entertainment for the nobleman’s grandchildren. By then his conscious dedication was to topographic landscape. The earl backed a trip to Italy, and thus Lear began a peripatetic career earning his living from images drawn from travels that took him from the Greek Islands to Egypt, India and the Middle East. Such watercolors make up the bulk of the exhibition.

Collectors of topographic pictures were not looking for art deeply stamped with personality. They wanted accurate renderings of sites held in sentimental memory or anticipatory longing. Lear usually gave them more than they paid for.

There’s a romantic sense of the sublime about such views as “Atrani, July 7, 1844.” It depicts a town located on the Gulf of Salerno that is virtually part of the cliffs that hold back the sea. “View at Zagori” captures the woozy plummet of a gorge into a purple atmosphere while “Giant’s Castle, Gozo” pulses with the eerieness of monumental prehistoric ruins on a island near Malta.

Lear could have picked up his sense of grand scale from the art of J.M.W. Turner. They were, however, artists of markedly different temperament. Lear’s rendering of Venice’s Grand Canal looks pedestrian because he disliked the fabled city while Turner doted on it.

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Lear’s landscapes are never uninteresting, but they come across more as acts of intelligence than inspiration. Their most recurrent emotional vector is the clear delight Lear took in the exercise of his skill, mixed with a vague wistfulness. It’s as if the landscapes represent the man he wanted to be rather than the one he was.

He was well-connected socially. People found him charming but he felt isolated. His travels were partly inspired by chronic ill health that he hoped to assuage by fleeing damp England. He made fun of his own appearance in a satirical poetic self-portrait. One verse reads:

His mind is concrete and fastidious His nose is remarkably big His visage is more or less hideous His beard resembles a wig. Unfortunately, he didn’t think he was kidding. Lear thought himself unattractive to women. He longed for love but never married, spending the last few years of his life living on the Riviera with a cherished tomcat called Foss.

The exhibition winds up evoking a kind of comic Cyrano hiding behind the persona of a handsome Romantic when he could have been loved for himself. Now, of course, he is.

* Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Through April 23. Closed Monday. (818) 405-2141.