Lear's exacting and masterly skills as an artist were employed by many major publishers of nineteenth century English ornithologies and natural histories.

Born at Highgate a suburb of London in 1812, Lear was the twentieth child of Jeremiah Lear, a well-to-do London stockbroker. In 1816, Jeremiah went bankrupt and was sent to a debtors prison. Edward was raised primarily by his elder sister, Ann, who taught him classical studies and drawing from nature. Lear began his career as an artist at the age of fourteen.

About 1828, Lear began work as a zoological draughtsman, gaining employment at the Zoological Society and working with, among other notables, Prideaux John Selby. It was there he also met John Gould, the Society's taxidermist, who was to become one of the great nineteenth century naturalist publishers. Lear drew sixty-eight plates and many of the foregrounds for Gould's Birds of Europe (1832-1837) and also contributed nine of the thirty-four plates that comprised Gould's A Monograph of the Family of Toucans. The plates that Lear contributed are among the finest of those works.

Lear's work is distinguished by the fact that he was the first bird artist to draw from living examples, capturing not only the precise details of the birds he painted, but also individual birds unique character traits.

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