Edward Lear (12 May 1812[1][2] – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.

As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets.

He felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition, and his adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view.

[8] Lear was already drawing "for bread and cheese" by the time he was aged 16 and soon developed into a serious "ornithological draughtsman" employed by the Zoological Society and from 1832 to 1836 by the Earl of Derby, who kept a private menagerie at his estate, Knowsley Hall.

After his eyesight deteriorated too much to work with such precision on the fine drawings and etchings of plates used in lithography, he turned to landscape painting and travel.

While travelling he produced large quantities of coloured wash drawings in a distinctive style, which he converted later in his studio into oil and watercolour paintings, as well as prints for his books.

[12] Between 1878 and 1883, Lear spent his summers on Monte Generoso, a mountain on the border between the Swiss canton of Ticino and the Italian region of Lombardy.

In 1842, Lear began a journey into the Italian peninsula, travelling through the Lazio, Rome, Abruzzo, Molise, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily.

In personal notes, together with drawings, Lear gathered his impressions on the Italian way of life, folk traditions, and the beauty of the ancient monuments.

Of particular interest to Lear was the Abruzzo, which he visited in 1843, through the Marsica (Celano, Avezzano, Alba Fucens, Trasacco) and the plateau of Cinque Miglia (Castel di Sangro and Alfedena), by an old sheep track of the shepherds.

[20] Another trusted companion in San Remo was his cat, Foss, who died in 1887 and was buried with some ceremony in a garden at Villa Tennyson.

On his headstone are inscribed these lines about Mount Tomohrit (in Albania) from Tennyson's poem To E.L. [Edward Lear], On His Travels in Greece: — all things fair.

Lear's birthplace area is now marked with a plaque at Bowman's Mews, Islington, in London, and his bicentenary during 2012 was celebrated with a variety of events, exhibitions and lectures in venues across the world including an International Owl and Pussycat Day on his birth anniversary.

[25] Lear's nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet's delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary.

One of his most famous verbal inventions, the phrase "runcible spoon", occurs in the closing lines of "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" and is now found in many English dictionaries.

[30] Five of Lear's limericks from the Book of Nonsense (in the 1946 Italian translation by Carlo Izzo) were set to music for choir a cappella by Goffredo Petrassi in 1952.

He was portrayed on television by Robert Lang in "Edward Lear: On the Edge of the Sand" a special episode of The Natural World, BBC2 14 April 1985.

Lear's written work was used extensively in the short-lived The Tomfoolery Show, a Saturday morning cartoon that was produced by Rankin-Bass and broadcast on NBC from 1970 to 1971.