There once was an artist called Lear...

THERE was a time, somewhere in the late 1970s, when Edward Lear was the most expensive Victorian painter, thanks to a vast canvas that had made perhaps £250,000. As I recall, it was one of a group he did of Corsican mountain forests and there was much astonishment from the press, who hadn’t realised that Lear was an artist as well as a writer of nonsense verse. My own reaction was