View of Ratnapura, Ceylon

Lear's trip to India and Ceylon was the longest, and last, trip in his life. He went at the invitation of his patron Lord Northbrook, the newly appointed Viceroy, and landed at Bombay on 22 November 1873; he left there to return to San Remo on 12 January 1875. He arrived at Colombo in Ceylon on 9 November 1874 and reached Ratnapura, as it is now called, on 23 November to stay with the local magistrate Hugh Nevill, the son of Lear's old friends, by now deceased, William and Mary Nevill. There was 'Nice large living rooms, but bedrooms fearfully ultra-uncomfortable, doorless, etc...Animals, apes, porcupines, hornbill, squirrel, pigeons, etc.., and figurative dirt!' (R. Murphy, Edward Lear's Indian Journal, London, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town, 1953, p. 220).

Moreover 'thick mist covers everything beyond what is close to the eye' (24 November; Murphy, p. 220), but, on the same day, Lear was able to draw 'on the banks of the Kalaganga, beautiful bamboo and palmy scenery, but no more' (Murphy, p. 220). Lear wrote nothing on 25 November, the date of the present drawing, but the next day noted that he 'Could only by patience and hard labour make any advance towards finishing the drawing I had begun' (Murphy, p. 220).

Nevertheless, despite the bad weather, Lear was later to use five other drawings done at Ratnapura to illustrate the poems of Tennyson (see Ruth Pitman, Edward Lear, Tennyson, Manchester and New York, 1988, pp. 200-1, nos. 65 and 97).