Campagna of Rome, Alexandrine Aqueduct

Edward Lear traveled widely during his lifetime, venturing to Albania, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and even going as far as India and Ceylon in 1873–75. Throughout all his travels, however, the artist was most captivated by Italy and the Mediterranean coast, ultimately living out the final years of his life in San Remo. Lear makes note of visiting the Campagna in his letters in 1847-48, when he traveled through Calabria (documented in his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, & c.) before ending the trip back in Rome in the early part of 1848. In one of Lear’s letters sent again from Rome on 22 March 1860, he mentions ‘being at work on a heap of pictures 20 in all: 2 of the Campagna…’ (Lady Strachey, ed., Letters of Edward Lear, London, 1907, p. 170). In a label on the reverse of the present work written by the artist he notes that this painting was made ‘from my drawings made in 1860’, presumably executed during this same trip.

The artist Henry Stackley wrote of Lear’s paintings of the Campagna, ‘Lear never seems to have had complete sympathy with any aspect of nature except one which showed him the greatest number of topographical details. If he painted the Roman Campagna every sinew in the plain was lovingly recorded, as was every arch of the aqueducts, and even the lumps of the fallen masonry in the foreground…No one has given better than he has the strange charm of this melancholy landscape. His success in this direction is, I think, due to that delicate sense of style which he possessed and which is needed to interpret such a classic scene. If Lear's pictures cannot rank beside those of the great masters of landscape, the best of his works will always have a real value for those who see beyond the fashion of the moment. This will be so because the artist's work was always dignified and sincere, and he had a true if somewhat formal sense of beauty’ (quoted in Lady Strachey, ed., Letters of Edward Lear, London, 1907, pp. xxxvii-xl).