The Upper Nile, Toske, Egypt

Among Lear's works, the pieces executed along the Nile were some of his most sucessful. He wrote with great solemnity on the views that he saw, 'In no place - it seems to me, can the variety and simplicity of colours be so well studied as in Eygpt; in no place are the various beauties of shadow more observable or interminably numerous. Every mud bank a picture, every palm - every incident of peasant life'. Lear had first travelled along the Upper Nile in December 1853 and returned for the third time in 1867, in part to seek warm weather to aid his ailing health.