EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888), was a British writer and artist, who created landscape paintings, nonsense verse, and the illustration of birds and reptiles. He was Queen Victoria's private drawing master and given a place in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. As a naturalist painter, his work is often compared to the bird paintings of Gould and Audubon, who both worked with Lear. As a writer, Lear's humorous alphabets and wordplay influenced such twentieth-century writers as Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, and Laura Richards.