ABSTRACT
Lear, besides having one of the most colorful personalities in the Victorian era, was a respectable ornithologist, a well-known landscape painter, a dedicated traveler, and an indefatigable nonsense writer. During his lifetime, he traveled across much of Europe, the Levant, and India, to remote and secluded locations less frequented by his British peers in search of picturesque sceneries. Professionally, except for the initial excursion into ornithological studies, Lear viewed himself primarily as a landscape painter. He published journals with landscape illustrations in a series he titled his 'Journals of a Landscape Painter'. In these journals, he constantly sought after the 'picturesque', a term that was universally valued by landscape artists in Lear's time. Although Lear does not directly engage with such a theoretical argument, he applies varying forms of the words sublime, beautiful, and picturesque throughout his journals and diaries. Moreover, the equivocally 'comparative' nature of size is underscored throughout Lear's nonsense, particularly his limericks.
