The artist is not happy. “A fearful night of wind and storm rain. Doubts passed through my waking thoughts if we should not all be carried away into the river,” writes Edward Lear in October 1848, in his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece & Albania (Century 1988) “by one of those thunderful gusts which swept over the plain at intervals with terrific force.
“In the pauses between the rage of the tempest all the surrounding country seemed alive with dogs, whose howling and barking added point to the furious din of the elements. ‘Water – water – everywhere but not a drop to’ – wash in: or, in spite of the passing rain, the supply of fluid within reach was the smallest, and that little was seized for coffee – breakfast versus cleanliness.”
The next day, Lear makes his way across “plains surrounded by the roots of hills, whose heads were hidden in cloud, excepting a low, bare, ill-outlined range on the left, which was ugly enough to have been obscured without any loss.”
He persists “though there never was less inducement to do so, for, apart from the vexation an artist feels who knows he is surrounded by beautiful scenery, the only chance in his life of seeing which is so adversely destroyed by unlucky weather, the physical annoyance of sitting on a stumbling horse – advancing one half mile per hour (at the quickest pace) through thick mud and overinundated meadows – this is no trifle, added to the loss of time and money from such unprofitable pastime, which is very trying to purse and temper.”
