The romantic coloring of the English traveler artist Edward Lear reveals – in an exhibition at the Asian Art Museum of Corfu – the virgin landscapes of the Ionian Islands of the 19th century, freed from the archeology of his time
«Around 3 in the morning we anchored in the beautiful paradise of Corfu and looked out over the calmest of seas, with the ridges of the hills covered with cypress trees and dotted with country houses all the way to the sea…», he wrote in his diary on 19 April 1848 the English traveler Edward Lear.
It is one of the notes of admiration of the English illustrator and poet of the Victorian era. Who in the spirit of 19th century travelers traveled to Greece, he was fascinated by the Ionian Sea and settled in Corfu painting watercolors, oil paintings, creating drawings and engravings.
As meticulous by nature and impressed by the beauty of the place, Lear detailed the corners of his works and the pages of his diary, and it is no exaggeration to think that if he were alive today he would be a successful social media user..
Two hundred years since his birth, the relationship of the philanthropic English artist with the Ionian Islands and especially with Corfu is reflected in the large exhibition that opened at the Museum of Asian Art under the roof of the Palaces of Archangelos Michael and Agios Georgios in Corfu.
Culture and tourism: the new product that Corfu has added to the choices of its visitors. Lear, with endless horizons, rocks bathed in evening light, seas framed by the dawn breeze, offers his share.
In the middle of the 19th century he traveled on foot or on horseback in unexplored Greece. The virgin landscapes that met his gaze he rendered in paintings. “More and more I'm getting the impression that eventually I'll mostly be known as “The Painter of Greece”», he declared himself as soon as he settled in Corfu, the 1856.
The exhibition "Edward Lear and the Ionian Islands" captures moments from his travels in the Ionian. Its significance lies in the fact that "in the vaguely melancholic landscapes from the Ionian Islands that Lear renders with romantic descriptiveness, his compatriots remotely collect the first information about the area", points out the curator of the exhibition and director of the Asian Art Museum Despina Zerniotis.
Twentieth of twenty-one children in the family of stockbroker Jeremiah Lear and his wife Ann, he was known in his homeland for poems and writings with paradoxologies (nonsense) and works with zoological illustrations. However, with the landscapes from his excursions in the Mediterranean he secured his living.
"The entirety of his Greek production constitutes a unique treasury of visual evidence for the natural environment of Greece in the 19th century. For the image of the landscape before the neo-Greek deformation and development interventions", Fani-Maria Chigaku points out, painting curator at the Benaki Museum.
Lear's humor prompted him to capture even snapshots of the daily lives of the inhabitants: villagers in local costumes of the Ionian Islands chat in front of huts or churches, they pose next to goats, while in his sketches he captured details from weddings and local festivals.
