Edward  Lear (1812-1888) is best known and much loved for “The Owl and the Pussycat” and other nonsense poetry.  But Lear was also a fine painter of birds, mammals, reptiles, and landscapes and an adventurous, world-wide traveler. During the golden age of natural history book production, Lear's parrots, macaws, toucans, owls, and other birds stand out as especially powerful and memorable.  He was a genius at capturing the life-like appearance and individual personalities of his subjects.  His mammal paintings, which feature everything from hedgehogs, shrews, kangaroos and bats, to Tasmanian Devils, are full of character and action. Often compared with Lewis Carroll for his nonsense verse and with Audubon for his portraits of birds, Lear's enigmatic career and private personality have made him less well known than his peers, and little understood, even by his many admirers.

Robert McCracken Peck, the author of the highly acclaimed book The Natural History of Edward Lear, will discuss the remarkable life and natural history paintings of this beloved children’s writer, who abruptly abandoned his scientific work soon after he achieved preeminence in the field.  Peck is the curator of art and artifacts at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, a guest curator of a bicentennial exhibition of Edward Lear’s natural history paintings at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and veteran of many scientific expeditions to remote regions of the Amazon rainforest and Mongolian steppes.  He is the author of books on other masters of wildlife art, including Audubon and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and has lectured widely on Lear in Great Britain and the United States.

Image: Study for Lear’s plate of the red and yellow macaw (Macrocercus aracanga), now known as the scarlet macaw (Ara Macao). Watercolor over graphite. Houghton Library at Harvard University. 

Presented in conjuction with Go Birds: Appreciating Our Avian Friends, a special exhibition on view in the Second Floor West Gallery of Parkway Central Library. Go Birds is a collaboration of the Children's Literature Research Collection, the Government Publications Department, the Map Collection, and the Print and Picture Collection. Visit the exhibition whenever Parkway Central Library is open through August 30, 2025 and check out the many other events associated with it.