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Alumnus curator donates works by Edward Lear to British Art Center

A collection of works by Victorian artist Edward Lear valued at over $1 million has been presented to the Yale Center for British Art by former University curator and alumnus Donald Gallup.

The Lear collection is the largest single gift to the British Art Center, apart from the donations of Yale alumnus Paul Mellon '29, whose generosity founded the museum 20 years ago. The Gallup gift includes seven oil paintings, two oil studies on paper, 362 drawings, 30 prints, 10 autograph letters, and other manuscripts and printed materials.

The addition of these new materials to the museum's current collection makes the British Art Center the home of the finest and most comprehensive public collection of Lear's works in the United States, Britain and throughout the English-speaking world., according to the museum's director Patrick McCaughey.

Best known as the author of "The Owl and the Pussy-cat" and other nonsense verse, Edward Lear, 1812-1888, suffered throughout his life from epilepsy, asthma, poor eyesight and chronic depression. Yet he achieved success as a draftsman, painter, illustrator and author.

Although he was little appreciated in his own time, Lear is now seen as one of the great exponents of the topographical tradition. In his drawings, watercolors and oil paintings, he documented the landscapes of Italy, Greece, Egypt, Palestine and much of the Mediterranean region, as well as India.

Mr. Gallup's gift to the British Art Center includes:

• Seven oil paintings, including Lear's masterpieces "Corfu from Ascension," "Butrinto" and "Kinchinjunga from Darjeeling."
• Materials related to the "Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots," including several proof impressions of the lithographs with notations and drawings.
• Nearly 30 of Lear's earliest landscape drawings from 1834 to 1836 of the Lake District and elsewhere in England.
• Drawings and watercolors from his various travels in the Mediterranean, including 250 drawings from his third visit to Egypt in 1867.
• Assorted manuscripts, including an autograph inventory of drawings and paintings of 1881, an illustrated manuscript of "St. Kivian and the Gentle Kathleen" and W.H. Auden's poem "Edward Lear."
• An exhibit showcasing the gift and placing Lear within the topographical tradition in British art is scheduled for spring of the year 2000.

Donald C. Gallup -- who earned his bachelor's degree at Yale in 1934 and a Ph.D. in 1939 -- is the former Elizabeth Wakeman Dwight Curator of the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. As a Yale scholar, Mr. Gallup developed close personal and professional relationships with many literary figures, among them Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Lincoln Kirstein and Thornton Wilder. He also edited works by Ezra Pound, Eugene O'Neill, Alfred Steiglitz and Marsden Harley. Mr. Gallup retired from Yale in 1980 and was elected honorary trustee of the Yale Library Associates that same year. A resident of New Haven, he continues to conduct research at the Beinecke.

The Yale Center for British Art, located at 1080 Chapel St., is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. The building is wheelchair-accessible. For further information, call 432- 2800, or visit the center's home page on the World Wide Web at http://www.yale.edu/ycba.