Resumen de Edward Lear in Syracuse
In 1852 the forty-year-old Edward Lear received tuition from the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt and began four paintings, of which he had completed three by the end of that year. All three have since entered public collections: The mountains of Thermopylae (Bristol City Art Gallery), Reggio. Calabria (Tate, London), and Venosa. Apulia (Toledo Museum of Art, OH). The fourth, finished in spring 1853 and exhibited at that year's Royal Academy, has not been seen in public since 1857, when it was selected to represent the artist at the great Manchester Art Treasures exhibition.' Known as The quarries of Syracuse, it was first exhibited with the title The City of Syracuse from the Ancient Quarries where the Athenians were Imprisoned BC 413 (Fig. 1). It was bought at the Royal Academy by Frederick Lygon, later 6th Earl Beauchamp, at whose family seat, Madresfield Court, the picture still hangs. The painting was discussed, but not illustrated, by Allen Staley in The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (1973),2 and it was not included in the comprehensive survey of Lear's work shown in 1985 at the Royal Academy, where the subject was represented by a drawing and an oil sketch.3 The painting is here published for the first time; recent cleaning has revealed it to be the strongest of the group of paintings done under Hunt's influence, and the most important of Lear's early oils.
