Cogoleto, Italy

Details

Edward Lear (1812-1888)
Cogoleto, Italy
inscribed, numbered and dated 'Cogoletto [sic] 1pm - 1.30 - 24. December. 1864 (80)' (lower right) and further inscribed with colour notes
pencil, pen and brown ink and watercolour
14 x 21¼ in. (35.6 x 54 cm.)

Provenance

The Hanburys of Mortola and by descent in the family.

Special notice

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Lot Essay

Lear left England in November 1864, to spend the winter in the Riviera. At the end of November he set off with Giorgio to walk to Genoa, they walked between sixteen and twenty miles a day, returning to Nice on New Year's Eve. As he wrote to William Holman Hunt from the Promenade des Anglais on 7 January 1865, 'One of my aims this winter was to 'get' all the Corniche or Riviera di Ponente; .. that I have done both ways with 145 sketches & better health than before - also less abdomen'. Cogoleto is on the Italian coast, close to Genoa, Lear's ultimate destination. These sketches he 'penned out' in the evenings for his possible, but never realised, book (V. Noakes, ed., Edward Lear, Selected Letters, Oxford, 1988, pp. 202-3).

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