Lear began making natural history drawings while still a child and was working as a draughtsman at the Zoological Gardens in 1831. The following year he published his first book and attracted the attention of Lord Derby for whom, over a period of four years, he worked on the bird illustrations for Derby's 'Knowsley Menagerie', published in 1856. He started travelling in the early 1830s with a visit to Holland, Switzerland and Germany. Thereafter he travelled extensively spending a large part of his life away from England. He made numerous landscape watercolour drawings, sometimes annotated with colour notes for future reference. These include numerous colourful studies of local craft in Venice, Malta and the Nile such as this, of which there are a number in the Museum's collection.