One of Lear’s most critically acclaimed drawings, this red and yellow macaw appears to be slyly showing off. Edward Lear was a man unafraid of his own imagination. In his best-known nonsense poems and limericks, he wrote of things the world has never seen: green-headed Jumblies; toeless Pobbles; oceanic romances between birds and cats. But before he began bringing these impossibilities to life, Lear had a different focus: he drew parrots. When he was young, Lear was employed as an ornithological illustrator, and he spent years learning to draw birds, favoring live models in an era when most worked from taxidermy. Before he turned 20, he’d published Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, a critical success, and the first monograph produced in England to focus on a single family of birds. ...While many artists of the time relied on taxidermied specimens—which, after all, were better at staying still—Lear preferred drawing live animals, and was known to occasionally enter their cages, so as to get a better look. ...Although Lear worked in many different media—his papers are full of ink, graphite, and watercolor sketches—the 42 works that make up Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae are lithographs, at the time a fairly new style of art, and one that required many detailed steps in order to produce a proper print. It apparently took Lear a little while to figure it all out: one early draft of a purple-naped lory is captioned “my first lithographic failure.” Eventually, though, he boiled the process down to a science. First, Levi writes, “A young zookeeper would hold the bird while Lear measured it in various directions.” Then Lear would make a few pencil drawings of the parrot, in different poses, doing his best to ignore the curious public (although sometimes he drew them, too). Next, he’d choose his favorite drawing, and create two different versions: one in black and white, which he then copied directly onto the limestone printing slab, and one in watercolor, which he sent to a team of professional colorists so that they could replicate his work exactly. [Article continues at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/edward-lear-parrot-lithograph-book?utm_source=bloglovin.com&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Artsjournal+(ArtsJournal)]