Forest of Bavella
Forest of Bavella
Edward Lear (1812-1888)
The Forest of Bavella, Corsica
Pen and brown ink and watercolour
9.3 by 10.3cm., 3 ½ by 4 inches
Lear spent the winter of 1867-68 in Cannes and left for Corsica on 8th April in the company of the writer John Addington Symonds and his family but set out to explore the island alone. He reached the Forest of Bavella on 28th April: `At times the mist is suddenly lifted like a veil, and discloses a whole forest - as it were in the pit of an immense theatre confined between towering rock-wall, and filling up with its thousands of pines all the great hollow - these crags, often as I have drawn their upper outline from the pass I have been ascending today, are doubly awful and magnificent now that I am close to them' (Edward Lear, Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica, 1870, p.92)