Page 16 - James Ward - A Lioness with a Heron

Detroit, Detroit Institute of Art; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Art Museum, Romantic Art in Britain,
1968, cat. no. 110.
Monterrey, Mexico, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Passage to the Present: Masterworks
from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, 2007-2008, cat. no. 46.
Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum; Mexico City, Museo de San Carlos; Greenwich, Bruce Museum;
Memphis, Memphis Brooks Museum; Nashville, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Ingram Gallery,
Masterpieces of European Painting from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, 2008-2010, cat. no. 55.

LITERATURE:

C. Reginald Grundy, James Ward, R.A.; His Life and Works, London, 1909, nos. 564-566, p. 48,
no. 566 illus. p. 10.5
J. S. Held, ‘A New Museum in Ponce’, in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 103, no. 700 (Jul 1961),
p. 371.
J. S. Held, ‘The New Museum in Ponce’, in The Art Quarterly, XXVII, 1964, p. 26 and p. 37, fig. 17.
J. S. Held, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Fundación Luis A. Ferré, Catalogue I, Paintings of the European and
American Schools, Ponce, 1965, pp. 192-193.
O. Beckett, The Life and Works of James Ward: The Forgotten Genius, Margate, 1995, p. 197, no. 186.

D ating from the very peak of James’s Ward’s career, the present picture shows a lioness
arrested in the act of devouring her prey, a grey heron. Lying at the edge of a stream, she
turns her head to the left, baring her teeth at an unseen foe, lending a heraldic element
complemented by the rise of her haunches, the curve of her flicking tail and the contrasting
sinuous pose of the heron trapped beneath her paw. Depicted at the very front of the picture plane, the
lioness’s foreshortened pose recedes into a darkly elemental landscape and adds depth to Ward’s
intensely shallow composition. Both animals are painted in bold strokes of earthen pigments combined
with copious amounts of lead white and applied with a thickly laden brush. With the resulting flicks
of high impasto Ward imitates with equal success both the bristling tongues of the lioness’s fur and the
rigid plumage of the terrified bird. Conversely, apart from the reeds and cattails in the foreground,
Ward employs broad wet-in-wet strokes of heavily diluted oils to depict the raw mountainous setting,
a technique that evokes simultaneously the work of both Rembrandt van Rijn and Thomas Girtin.

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