Lear’s Greek maps
As befits a topographical artist, Lear was a keen maker, and user, of maps. His diaries and letters include sketch maps, sometimes with sections and altitude diagrams, as well as street plans, house layouts and table plans. He frequently records buying, or borrowing and copying, maps (where they existed) of the places he visited. Of his seven published illustrated travel books, the three with extensive letterpress (Albania, Southern Calabria, Corsica) include at least one map; all were drawn for engraving by Lear himself.
It was important to him that his correspondents should be able to follow and imagine his journeys: “I wish you would buy yourself a little map of Turkey in Europe & Greece,”he urged his sister, “I think the society for universal knowledge has these maps very cheap”.
Maps gave Lear an overall sense of the geography and helped him plan his routes, but were sometimes unreliable on the ground. On a sketch of Cephalonia (8 May 1863) he notes discrepancies between the information on maps and his own observation and identification of landscape features. He also recognised the difference between cartography and topographical draughtsmanship: between a mappable and a “drawable” view. The day after he “did” a map of Cephalonia he went up the Black Mountain, from where “all the country below is seen as in a map ― but tho’ showing a most fertile & rich trait ― is undrawable mainly” ( Diary, 11 May 1863) .
He often employed this trope of landscape-as-map: “it is for the wondrous and extensive view over the plains of Thessaly that it is most celebrated—a scene I was not fated to be indulged with; for no sooner had I surmounted the last crag of the ridge, in enthusiastic expectation of the outstretched map of which I had so often heard, than lo ! all was mist.”
Lear as Mapmaker
Apart from those in his published travel books the maps Lear made for his journeys do not survive; it is possible, however, to reconstruct something of his method. Arriving in a new place he would make a point of tracking down a local map, from which he could construct his own version. This would typically take two or three hours, enough for the level of detail needed for his day-to-day travels. In Zante, for example, he made a map from 11 to 1.30 (Diary, 26 May 1863). In Cerigo Lear breakfasted at 8 am and “afterwards made a map until 12.30”; allowing for a comfortable breakfast, this would have given him more than three hours to work at his map (Diary, 18 May 1863).
We know from time and date notes on his sketches that Lear could capture the lines of a landscape and fill in indicative detail in half an hour or so; I estimate he could make a copy of a map such as the one in his Albania book in three hours.
What did he copy? In Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania Lear acknowledges five earlier travel books; all contain maps of varying degrees of clarity and accuracy. The most useful was William Martin Leake’s Travels in Northern Greece (4 vols, 1835), which Lear refers to when travelling in Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus, Thessaly and Central Greece. Leake carried out the surveys for his own maps and plans, measuring “a great number ofangles with the sextant or theodolite”; he copied the coastline from Admiralty surveys. His map is accurate in detail but the result is cluttered and hard to read.
For Lear, Leake was “the first authority” on Greek travel, and he probably based his own map on Leake’s. He greatly simplified the detail so that only main towns and rivers are featured. There are no politicaI boundaries and no relief apart from the main mass of the Pindus (marked by hachures). The map must have been copied freehand rather than traced, as Lear has compressed the scale in the horizontal direction to fit the format of his book. He follows Leake’s form and orthography in place names and adds his own routes in 1848 and 1849 as dotted lines.
Sketch Maps and Plans
Several of Lear's quick sketches and plans from his visits to Greece survive in his letters to family and friends.
Published Maps of Greece
Lear had access to a range of maps, in atlases, books and guides or as separate sheets. Illustrated here is a selection published in Britain; there were of course French, German, Italian, Dutch and Greek maps.
Maps of Athens and Southern Greece
There is no evidence as to which maps Lear used in on his journeys in 1848 and 1849. For the Peloponnese he would probably have chosen to consult Leake’s map in his Travels in the Morea. For Euboea, which Leake never visited, he probably used a general map of Greece, and for Athens and its environs one of the compendium guides comprising maps, plans and guides to the principal sites.
Maps of Crete
For Crete, Lear had recourse to two maps: an earlier one from Robert Pashley’s Travels in Crete (2 vols, 1837) and a newly-available one by T.A.B. Spratt, published in advance of his Travels and Researches in Crete (2 vols, 1865).
Maps specially compiled for this website
Lear’s route in Athens, the mainland and the island of Euboea, June–July 1848 [constructed by Elizabeth Wells]
Lear’s route in the Peloponnese, Attica and Central Greece, March–April 1849 [constructed by Stephen Duckworth]
Lear’s route in mainland Greece and Mount Athos, August–October 1856
From Corfu to Ouranoupoli [constructed by Rowena Fowler]
Mount Athos [constructed by Stephen Duckworth]
Lear’s route in Epirus: Ioannina and the Zagoria villages, April 1857 [constructed by Rowena Fowler]
Lear’s route in Crete, April–May 1864 [constructed by Roger Bedding, Stephen Duckworth and Rowena Fowler]
