Artist, Author. He is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularized. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making colored drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense works, which use real and invented English words. He was educated at home, mainly by his sister Ann, who was twenty one years his senior. He suffered from an early age from asthma and bronchitis, and also both depression (the 'Morbids') and epilepsy (the 'demon'). In 1827 the family split up, and he set up house in Grays Inn Road, London, with his sister Ann. He began to draw to earn a living around 1827, coloring screens, fans and prints, and for some time making disease drawings for doctors and hospitals. In 1830 he made application to the Zoological Society to make drawings of the parrots in their collection. From his drawings from life he produced fine hand colored lithographs, which he sold by subscription. Though the series was never finished. In 1831 he began collaborating with John Gould on the Birds of Europe, and accompanied him to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin and Berne. Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, had seen him at work at the zoological gardens, and invited him to his 100 acre Knowsley Park, near Liverpool, to make drawings of the birds in his menagerie. Lear worked at Knowsley off and on for the next six years. He also developed ambitions to become a landscape painter, and enrolled in Sass's School of Art, which prepared students for the Royal Academy Schools, then visited Ireland and toured the Lake District, making sketches. his health deteriorated, and Lord Stanley and his nephew Robert Hornby together offered to send him to Rome. He stayed in Italy for most of the next 10 years, supporting himself by teaching and selling drawings. nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet's delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary. A stuffed rhinoceros becomes a "diaphanous doorscraper". A "blue Boss-Woss" plunges into "a perpendicular, spicular, orbicular, quadrangular, circular depth of soft mud". His heroes are Quangle-Wangles, Pobbles, and Jumblies. His most famous piece of verbal invention, the phrase "runcible spoon", occurs in the closing lines of The Owl and the Pussycat, and is now found in many English dictionaries.