EDWARD LEAR (LONDON 1812-1888 SAN REMO)

Lear left England in November 1864 to spend the winter in Nice, and at the end of November set off to walk to Genoa. Walking between sixteen and twenty miles a day, he returned to Nice on New Year's Eve. The trip was enormously productive for him: as he wrote to William Holman Hunt from the Promenade des Anglais on 7 January 1865, 'One of my aims this winter was to 'get' all the Corniche or Riviera di Ponente; .. that I have done both ways - with 145 sketches & better health than before - also less abdomen'. These sketches he 'penned out' in the evenings for his projected, but never realised, book (Vivien Noakes, ed., Edward Lear, Selected Letters, Oxford, 1988, pp. 202-3).
This impressive view of Villefranche was executed at the end of his stay in France; another drawing from the same viewpoint, dated 30 November 1864, was sold at Christie's, London, 5 June 2006, lot 63.