There once was a fellow named Lear

The owl and the pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat:

They took some honey,

and plenty of money

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

— Edward Lear, "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat"

Edward Lear, together with his literary and national compatriot Charles Dickens celebrates his 200th birthday this year, albeit with less fanfare as befits a lifelong loner and introvert.

Even so, Lear, who spent three years on the Greek island of Corfu, was the object of major celebrations there earlier this year. Famed for his limericks and nonsense rhymes, such as "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat," he preferred to be known for his more than 10,000 paintings, which are scattered in private collections, institutions, and museums around the world. A large number of them are on display this summer at Corfu's Palace of St. Michael and St. George, the former summer home of the Greek royal family.

Lear was the 20th of 21 children. His presumably exhausted mother handed him off to the care of her sister, Ann, and, says British psychiatrist Anthony Stevens, who has lived on Corfu for eight years and was a keynote speaker at the recent celebrations, "Like many children who suffered maternal rejection, Edward felt it must be his own fault and as a result he never overcame his feelings of personal unattractiveness."

Stevens suggests that Lear's determination to make people laugh with his limericks and to charm them with his art might have been to compensate for these feelings of ugliness. The medical term for this is "body dysmorphic disorder" — in Lear's case a morbid obsession with his physical appearance — fat, balding, and with a large and bulbous nose. Maybe that's what prompted this among his hundred or more limericks:

There was an old man of West Dumpet

Who possessed a large nose like a trumpet

When he blew it aloud

It astonished the crowd

And wakened the whole of West Dumpet.

BDD, as it's known, is treated today with serotonin uptake inhibitors — antidepressants such as Prozac or Zoloft, drugs certainly not available in Lear's time. The affliction might also suggest why Lear never married. According to biographer Michael Montgomery, Lear wasn't gay, as has been suggested, but a secret romantic who fell in love twice during his years in Corfu and wanted to marry, but felt he was too odd and too set in his ways to make it work.

As a child, Lear suffered from epilepsy, bronchitis, asthma, and episodes of acute depression, which he called "The Morbids." As a result, rather than attending the rigorous and sometimes ruthless Victorian boarding schools, he was home schooled by his Aunt Ann, who taught him to paint flowers, butterflies, and birds.

Much of Stevens' address to the dignitaries in Corfu focused on migration. The main reason people migrate is the dream of a utopia, a promised land "every bit as peaceful as the paradise womb from which we have been expelled and to which we long to go back." A bit of psychospeak perhaps, but Stevens went on to say that even if cartographers cannot show us that utopia, the great artists can show us what it's like in the manner of the sublime beauties of the landscape that Edward Lear painted so lovingly.

"Heaven," Lear wrote, "should involve a park and a beautiful view of sea and hill, mountain and after I am quite established — say for a million or two years — an angel of a wife." Many of the current exhibits at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including works by Gauguin, Cezanne, and Matisse, depict such an earthly paradise, or Arcadia.

According to Lear biographer Vivian Noakes, the Learian limerick focuses on the singular individual, an old or young person, man or woman, who is distinguished by unusual appearance, behavior, talents, diet, or dress. In its most typical form it announces the existence of the eccentric, notes a dwelling place, and describes the subject's distinctive features. For example:

There was an old person of Dover

Who rushed through a field of blue Clover

But some very large bees

Stung his nose and his knees

So he very soon went back to Dover.

So even if you can't paint as idyllically as Lear, it's at least fun to try your hand at being Learian — as I do here:

There was an old fellow named Lear

Who repeatedly cried in his beer

That of all of his woes

Much worst was his nose

And the source of his dysmorphic fear.