View of Mount Athos, Greece

Between 1853 and 1868, Lear spent the years travelling throughout the Mediterranean. He had attempted to visit Mount Athos, in 1848 and 1849 with Charles Church, but without success. He eventually arrived there in September 1856, when he spent three weeks travelling throughout the peninsular and managed to visit all twenty principal monasteries and most of their dependencies. The location provided him with the perfect subject matter; medieval architecture perched on the rocks of the Holy Mountain, on stark promontories overlooking the Aegean or sometimes almost hidden among secluded cypress groves and lush vegetation. Lear was received warmly wherever he went and found the landscape and architecture beautiful. He captured the approach to Mount Athos in a letter to his sister Ann, ‘one crosses a ridge of hills, whence Mount Athos is first discovered – a blue peak on a bluer sea – seen above the most wondrous forests of beech I ever beheld. Nothing did I ever behold more lovely than those views’. As he crossed to the isthmus, the path became ‘most toilsome through the wildest and grandest forest scenery – from which every now and then you looked out on such screens and depths of green wood as would astonish those who talk of England as having more trees than other countries’.