About this artwork

Lear wrote that his aim was to produce ‘correct representation of many places little cared for or studied by most painters’. He was keen to travel to and make sketches of Mount Athos in northern Greece, the Holy Mountain of the Orthodox Church, ‘for I believe no such collection of illustrations has yet been known in England’. Lear eventually reached Mount Athos in late summer 1856. He spent three weeks visiting the twenty principal monasteries and made fifty drawings. The monastery of Pantokratora is on the north-east coast of the Mount Athos peninsula.

Updated before 2020

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Edward Lear

Edward Lear