St Cross College, Oxford

According to the catalogue of Audrey Blackman's collection of watercolours (p.40), this drawing depicts "Desfiro, Greece". In fact the name "Delvino" is written in Greek (whether by the artist or not) in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture.

Delvino is the Greek name for the town of Delvina, now in Albania but largely inhabited by ethnic Greeks. At the time Edward Lear visited the place it was still in the Ottoman Empire.

Peter Mackridge with Edward Lear's drawing

Lear visited Delvino twice during the course of his long sojourns in Corfu, which was the main base of his activities, with some interruptions, from 1855 to 1864. His first visit was part of a two-month journey to Mount Athos and back, which began with a small tour of the region in the company of Colonel and Mrs Ormby, residents of Corfu, and Lear's friend Franklin Lushington, Supreme Court judge in the Ionian Islands (then under British rule). They crossed the narrow straits from Corfu to Santi Quaranta (now Saranda, described by Lear as the port serving Delvino) on Lushington's yacht, the Midge, on 7 August 1856. As he wrote to his sister Ann:

On the 8th the Ormsbys, Frank and I went early to Delvino, which is immensely picturesque: it seemed odd enough to come all at once again into the use of divans and round tables and cross legs! But the wonderful picturesqueness of Albania is as new and beautiful as ever: and after the eternal, though lovely cities of Corfu, I must say we, Frank and I, found it very refreshing.

It was on the day the party returned to the coast (9 August 1856) that Lear began work on this drawing, which depicts the fort apparently built during Ali Pasha's time at the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Lear made another tour of Epirus, lasting three weeks, in April 1857, again crossing from Corfu on Lushington's yacht. On 20 April, the day before leaving Delvino, Lear resumed work on this drawing: it is clear from the two dates that he wrote in the bottom right-hand corner that he must have taken this first sketch back with him to Delvino in 1857 so that he could work on it again. I don't know whether he was in the habit of returning to a place with an unfinished picture so as to continue working on it. At all events, the words in the catalogue ("he returned to his drawing") do not make it clear that Lear actually returned to the site that it depicts.

The Ashmolean has a drawing of Santi Quaranta sketched on 22 April 1857. Lear notes that he "penned out the last drawing of all the Albanian tour in 1857, evening of March 6, 1862".

Sources:

For Lear's visits: Edward Lear. The Corfu years. A chronicle presented through his letters and journals. Edited and introduced by Philip Sherrard (Denise Harvey & Co., Athens & Dedham 1988), pp.51, 87-8, 107-8, 238.

For the information on Delvina: James Pettifer, Blue Guide, Albania. 2nd edn. (A & C Black, London 1996), p.144.

Peter Mackridge