Finale

'Finale' was made during the winter of 1864 when Lear was staying in Nice. Shortly after his arrival in December he embarked on a walking trip along the coast to Italy. On 16 and 17 December he was in the town of Finale Ligure where, excited by the landscape, he wrote in his diary: 'the rolling sea was magnificent'. He returned to Nice no later than New Years Eve 1864 with a folio of 144 drawings of the area. The Lady Lever watercolour, which represents the rocky Ligurian coastline with the town of Finale in the distance, is typical of the many thousands of vigorous, freely handled landscapes produced by Lear on his travels in the 1860s.