Lot Essay
Mount Soracte, or Soratte, lies north of Rome near Nepi, halfway to Viterbo. This studio drawing was presumably based on an earlier sketch executed on an expedition from Rome, where Lear lived off and on between 1838 and 1848 and stayed again in the winter of 1859-60, 1871 and 1877. A more finished version was lent to an exhibition in Rome in 1911 by Dr. G.S. Brook (photograph in Witt Library), and the composition was also used for one of Lear's illustrations to Tennyson's in the mid 1880s: the drawing is numbered '45' and inscribed 'or the Maid-Mother by a Crucifix -/(the Palace of Art)/Mount Soracte./from Nepi./Italy', the quotation being from Tennyson's The Palace of Art, 1832, revised 1842, line 93 (see R. Pitman, Edward Lear's Tennyson, Manchester and New York, 1988, pp.88, 199, illustrated).