Chris Gollon lived close to the Oatlands Park Hotel in Weybridge for two decades, formerly Henry VIII's hunting lodge by the Thames, which then became a stately home where Edward Lear used to stay and created there a pets' cemetery, and left a drawing, a facsimile of which still hangs in the hotel. Gollon loved Lear's sense of the absurd, laced with warm humour and empathy, but also often deeply tragic and heart-rending and even more so for the absurd humour. He went on to paint imaginative landscapes of Chankley Bore and other places evoked in Lear's poems. This painting is of Lear's Dong with a luminous Nose, whose fate was to forever tramp the Great Gramboolian Plain, looking in vain, for his Jumbly Girl.