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Product Description:
Edward Lear is known throughout the world as the author of the best limericks and nonsense rhymes in English literature. Yet the earliest years of his career were devoted to quite a different creative enterprise: a series of extraordinary bird paintings of a quality and style to rival the work of even the great John James Audubon. This new study by art historian Susan Hyman reproduces the best of Lear’s plates, each of which embodies the sense of movement, color and design that led Sir Sacheverell Sitwell to call Lear “prehaps the best of bird painters.” Toucans, parrots, eagles, ducks, owls–however exotic of familiar the subject, these magnificent portraits capture not just the charactieristics of a species but the character of the individual bird.