In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and flamboyant, shimmering with the lush firstness of a world untrammeled by the boot of civilization.

Edward Lear (May 12, 1812–January 29, 1888), barely out of his teens, had been working on his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots for two years. Moved by the young man’s talent and passion, one of William Turner’s patrons — a wealthy woman with a deep feeling for nature and art — had procured for him an introduction to the newly opened London Zoo, which had denied other artists access. Lear spent endless hours at the parrot house. When the zoo closed, he dashed across Regent’s Park to the museum of the London Zoological Society and continued drawing.

In a letter to a friend penned at the feverish outset of the project, he is already becoming himself — passionate and playful, part Humboldt, part Lewis Carroll, entirely original, prototyping the nonsense verse he would be remembered for:

For all day I’ve been away at the West End,
Painting the best end
Of some vast Parrots
As red as new carrots

Birds had always been Lear’s great enchantment, the bellows to stoke the fire of his love of life. Parrots were special — “live emeralds,” he wrote in his diary, emissaries of “the sense of freshness and freedom” he found in wild nature and craved ferociously in London’s gilded cage. To render them true to life was to contact his own wildness. He couldn’t bear to draw from “skins” and “specimens” — dead husks explorers brought back from expeditions for scientists to study life — so he spent small eternities waiting for the living birds at the zoo to perch at the perfect angle and hold the pose long enough for him to begin sketching.

Jenny Uglow — one of my favorite custodians of cultural hindsight — describes his process in her magnificent biography Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (public library):

At the zoo, he measured wingspan, length and legs while the young keeper Goss held the birds still. He chose their most striking, defining pose (and in his paintings they do seem to pose), then he sketched them — perched on branches, preening, nodding and blinking at the artist before them — in countless rough drawings, surrounded by jotted notes. He caught the arc of movement and the tilt of heads and drew their graduated feathers and soft down with painstaking accuracy, noting the smallest gradations of colour and texture. He made test sheets of colour, dabbing the tints around the sketches as a guide. But he also gave the birds character: the green and red Kuhl’s parakeets seem to talk to each other; the salmon-crested cockatoo appears blushingly vain; the great red and yellow macaw turns its head with a wary, arrogant glance and the blue and yellow macaw leans forward, its feathers ruffled and high. It is hard to tell who is the observer, artist or bird.

Parrots saturated what Lear most relished in nature. Color poured from his brush, alive with the same feeling-tone he found during his long walks in the forests of the Lake District, marveling in his journal at “the emerald blue deep beneath, the pale blue beyond.” He envisioned making a ravishing book of his birds, emanating all the vastness and vibrancy of life itself.

But the processes for reproducing such bright colors and printing such large folios were cumbersome and expensive. No publisher would take the risk. So, a century after William Blake pioneered the artist-entrepreneur model of self-publishing, Lear decided to crowdfund and self-publish his labor of love: He would produce 175 copies for subscribers at ten shillings each, then use the proceeds to publish a bound book for the public. He began offering subscriptions to old friends and neighbors, parents of his former students, dukes and duchesses, eminent naturalists, and even the president of the Linnaean Society, hoping they would become seed investors in his vision.

The lavish large-format art he envisioned was modeled on Audubon’s pioneering “elephant folio” of Birds of America, published five years earlier after fourteen years of struggle. Lear — who was around the age of Audubon’s sons — had befriended the American artist during his European lecture tour and had become especially close with one of his sons. When Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots was finally published as a bound book, Audubon bought a copy and wrote admiringly about it in his journal.

But the unexampled is always at odds with the commonplace, the visionary always at odds with the commodity: Commercially, the book was a dismal failure. Creatively, it changed the course of natural history illustration and paved the way for the future of book art; it changed the course of Lear’s life — the unknown young man was soon tutoring the young Queen Victoria in painting and working for the eminent taxidermist turned ornithological writer John Gould, whose gifted wife Elizabeth also trained with Lear to become one of the world’s greatest ornithological artists herself. (Her birds were even more joyous to work with than Audubon’s in my divinations project.)

Perhaps Lear’s parrots are so striking, so alive, because he was always in an I-Thou relationship with the birds. The drawings that filled his room spoke to him: “A huge Maccaw is now looking me in the face as much as to say — ‘finish me,’” he wrote to a friend; they spoke the language of his soul:

The whole of my exalted & delightful upper tenement in fact overflows with them, and for the last 12 months I have so moved — looked at, — & existed among Parrots — that should any transmigration take place at my decease I am sure my soul would be very uncomfortable in anything but one of the Psittacidae.

Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for being alive. The parrots were not just an aesthetic passion for Lear. “A deep black bitter melancholy destroys me,” he wrote in his journal. Just as Marianne North turned loneliness and loss into wonder with her pioneering paintings of exotic plants and Ernst Haeckel turned the deepest heartbreak into enchantment with his breathtaking drawings of jellyfish, Lear painted what he saw in order to keep looking out. All melancholy is a stranglehold of selfing. All joy is a surrender to something larger than oneself. In nature, in wildness, Lear came unselved, so that he could gasp in his journal after a day of walking in the forest and sketching: “Is it not wonderful to be alive?”