The Temple of Olympian Zeus, with the Acropolis in the distance, Athens, Greece

The present watercolour is a more finished version of a large working drawing sold at Sotheby's London, 13 November 1997, lot 129, (32,200). The working drawing, annotated extensively with Lear's notes, date from Lear's first visit to Athens in June 1848. In May while on Corfu, he met Sir Stratford Canning, the British Ambassador in Turkey, who he knew from Rome. Sir Stratford invited Lear to accompany him and his wife to Athens, where they were spending a week on their way back to Constantinople. They arrived in Athens on 2 June and the next day Lear wrote to his sister 'surely never was anything so magnificent as Athens!' (see ed. Susan Hyman, Edward Lear in the Levant: Travels in Albania, Greece and Turkey in Europe, 1848-1849, London, 1988, p. 45).