4 HORSES AND AN INDIA RUBBER BED
Travels with Edward Lear
through Albania and Greece


A series of three, one hour films for television
presented by writer and traveller Robert Horne

Many of us have enjoyed the popular nonsense and comic rhymes of Edward Lear. Like Lewis Carroll his writings and drawings for children captured the Victorian imagination and remain well loved today. But few of us are aware of his talents as a serious landscape painter, diarist, poet and musician. More than this he was a great traveller. He was in the vanguard of Westerners to explore and illustrate the turbulent Balkans of the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire, and importantly for posterity and for us, the journals and paintings he produced on his journeys survive.

Who was Edward Lear? What on earth was a clumsy artist with bad eyesight and a weak constitution doing risking life and limb in such inhospitable regions? And what has become of the world he explored over 150 years ago? With Lear’s words and pictures, rich in detail and observation, as a guide, Robert Horne seeks the answers, retracing his epic journey of 1848-49 through today’s northern Greece, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Albania. It is a region often as little understood today as it was then, whose wild and spectacular landscape is one of the most magnificent, unspoiled and still barely visited in Europe.

Lear’s journal and paintings become the signposts and markers on a dual journey to explore both Lear and vistas dotted with romantic historical remains that reveal much of the regions common history and rich culture. A fresh perspective is achieved by contrasting the experience of the intrepid Victorian traveller with the realities of today in a region where the legacy of the last hundred years or so has left it struggling to come to terms with the modern world.

Edward Lear’s natural good humour and resilience were frequently put to the test by the usual perils of travel at the time, the terrain, the weather and the unpredictable locals, made worse by malaria and his susceptibility to epilepsy and depression. Robert shows that travel was not only good for Lear’s poor constitution but a distraction from his unfulfilled personal life, fraught with insecurities and loneliness. It provided social contact unobtainable in the straight-laced world back home and was an alternative path to companionship. Lear was never alone while on the road sketching. In a similar way Robert Horne encounters a host of individuals along his journey, from experts to interested locals often set against a spectacular backdrop.