Edward Lear (12 or 13 May 1812– 29 January 1888); English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularized. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draftsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making colored drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes, and alphabets. He also composed and published 12 musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of 21children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker formerly working for the family sugar refining business. He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann, 21 years his senior. Jeremiah Lear ended up defaulting to the London Stock Exchange in the economic upheaval following the Napoleonic Wars; owing to the family's now more limited finances, Lear and his sister were required to leave the family home, Bowmans Lodge, and live together when he was 4. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother for him until her death, when he was almost 50 years of age. Lear suffered from lifelong health afflictions. From the age of 6 he suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures, and bronchitis, asthma, and during later life, partial blindness. Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate with his father. Lear was already drawing "for bread and cheese" by the time he was 16 and soon developed into a serious "ornithological draftsman" employed by the Zoological Society... He was the first major bird artist to draw birds from real live birds, instead of skins.... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lear) undefined

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