Lot Essay
Lear executed this watercolour two days after lot 90, during his stay in Crete. On 6 May 1864 Lear left Episkopi and arrived at the important fortress town and port of Rethymnon, where, despite being in a 'Horrid hot box of a room!... [he] slept tolerably. Bugs alas!' (R. Fowler, ed., Edward Lear, The Cretan Journal, Athens and Dedham, 1984, p.60). In Lear's day the name Perivalia appears to have been applied to a number of villages outside the walls of Rethymnon rather than the seaside resort of today; indeed, as Lear points out, the name meant 'gardens' (Fowler, op.cit., p.61). After drawing on the east side of Rethymnon from six to nine o'clock in the morning on 7 May, Lear went beyond Perivolia, then down to the sea for an early lunch, and from about midday until after 2 o'clock to what he calls 'Perivolia villages' in the plural, as well as 'the "gardens"' wondering about or sitting in the shade of a mulberry tree. As well as our drawing, executed at 1.30 o'clock, he executed another numbered '(89)' at 2 o'clock (misdated 8 May; see Fowler, op.cit., p.60, the drawing, in the Gennadius Library, Athens, illustrated); this shows the same balanced devices for watering the fields, which are labelled 'green' on our drawing and 'vegetables' on the other, but the view is different, lacking the distant mountain peak shown in our example.