Page 19 - James Ward - A Lioness with a Heron

The picture also made a profound impression on other artists, both British and French, including
possibly Théodore Géricault, who may have seen the painting, either in the original or from an
engraving, when he travelled to London around 1820.9 What is certain is that Géricault ranked Ward
among the few English artists he admired at this time. After seeing Ward’s equine portraits in the Royal
Academy’s summer exhibition, Géricault wrote to Horace Vernet: ‘Of the animals painted by
Ward...the Old Masters themselves have not done better in this line.’

Several of Géricault’s scenes of lions and horse fighting date from his English period and owe a great
deal to the work of Stubbs, whose work Géricault would have know from engravings even before he
travelled to England. However, as Lorenz Eitner has pointed out, Géricault’s passion for depicting
exotic animals on the attack derived from several sources, including Rubens’s hunting scenes, and it is
equally possible that he could have seen the lion and tiger subjects that Ward engraved in mezzotint
between 1799 and 1820. It is worth remarking that, when Charles Clément compiled a list of the copies
that Géricault painted after other artists remaining in his studio after his death, Clément noted only
two examples by English masters: one by Reynolds, and one by Stubbs, which he mistook for Ward.10

Ward’s animal subjects, both exotic and domestic, showcase a superb command of animal anatomy
and environment, often informed by his very personal concept of the sublime. Ward was an
exceptionally intelligent and ambitious man whose lack of formal education, and initial failure to gain
entry to the Royal Academy, made him a stubbornly independent artist and thinker. He developed a
distinctive, often eclectic, approach to subject and technique, and his idea of the sublime had more in
common with the philosophies of John Bunyan than Edmund Burke’s or Immanuel Kant’s arguments
on the subject. The single most important element of Ward’s genius as an animal painter, however,
was his deeply personal love for Britain’s countryside and its changing relationship to British society.
This affinity arose partly from the fact that, as a city dweller throughout his miserable formative years,
his forays into the countryside represented a kind of reprieve from a boyhood spent toiling in the cellars
and yards of south London. Moreover, Ward’s sporadic, often thwarted (as he believed), artistic
training compelled him to seek instruction outside the Academy. His participation in the Sketching
Society and participation in the dissection workshops and attendance at the lectures of Dr. Charles Bell
increased his command of anatomy and encouraged a deeper understanding of the distinctive movements
and expressions of animals. Finally, Ward was doggedly determined to succeed despite his lack of

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