Edward Lear, Corfu from Ascension, c. 1860. Yale Center for British Art
Edward Lear was the first British artist to give proper attention to olive trees. We have no difficulty finding olive trees beautiful today, but in the eighteenth century an artist visitor to Tivoli, Thomas Jones, thought them “thin & stragling” and only good for distances. Edward Lear saw his first olive trees at Lecco, on his way to Rome, and wrote to his sister Ann “I think them very beautiful, more like a huge lavender bush, or a fine grey willow than anything else, and all over green olives.” When he made drawings of Tivoli, he placed the olive trees in the foreground, lavishing attention on their twisting trunks and branches, with the villa at Tivoli and its famous waterfalls visible only in the distance, in a gap between the trees.
Lear also travelled extensively in Greece and Albania, and his favourite place was Corfu, of which he wrote “The extreme gardeny verdure – the fine olives, cypresses, almonds, and oranges, make the landscape so rich.” Lear preferred the countryside, where the trees grew in a semi-wild state, to the formal gardens that had impressed his eighteenth-century predecessors, and he also seems to have had a fondness for trees useful to mankind, such as fruit or nut trees.
Later in life, on seeing Corfu again, he made this note in his diary: “the loved olive … No wonder the Olive is undrawn – unknown: so inaccessible = poetical = difficult are its belongings.” In an oil painting, Corfu From Ascension he juxtaposes an olive grove with snow-capped mountains in the distance and ruins in the foreground. There are some goats near the ruins, but the olive trees seem even more alive than the animals, their trunks swaying like the movements of graceful dancers.
Lear also travelled extensively in Greece and Albania, and his favourite place was Corfu, of which he wrote “The extreme gardeny verdure – the fine olives, cypresses, almonds, and oranges, make the landscape so rich.” Lear preferred the countryside, where the trees grew in a semi-wild state, to the formal gardens that had impressed his eighteenth-century predecessors, and he also seems to have had a fondness for trees useful to mankind, such as fruit or nut trees.
Later in life, on seeing Corfu again, he made this note in his diary: “the loved olive … No wonder the Olive is undrawn – unknown: so inaccessible = poetical = difficult are its belongings.” In an oil painting, Corfu From Ascension he juxtaposes an olive grove with snow-capped mountains in the distance and ruins in the foreground. There are some goats near the ruins, but the olive trees seem even more alive than the animals, their trunks swaying like the movements of graceful dancers.
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