Page 21 - James Ward - A Lioness with a Heron

artistic reputation was diminished somewhat in his own lifetime by missteps such as The Waterloo
Allegory, and petty feuds with other Academicians. Furthermore, in the decades following his death in
1859, the impact of Ward’s work on both British and French art of the time was sometimes
underestimated, partly due to shifting perceptions of what constituted a masterpiece of animal painting.
For example, Ward’s reputation as an animal painter has been skewed by comparisons to earlier masters
of the genre, most obviously George Stubbs (1724-1806) and George Morland (1763-1804). However,
unlike Stubbs, Ward was not primarily an equine painter, and his debt to the brilliant but dissolute
Morland was, for the most part, related to Ward’s genre compositions, or his documentary studies of
cows and sheep, some of which admittedly helped launch his career. Equally, Ward’s work is often
compared to examples by the succeeding generation of British painters, such as Sir Edwin Landseer
(1803-1873), whose popular, often brilliant, sometimes mawkish, animal narratives bear resemblance
only to Ward’s later works, produced after 1832, when he left London for Cheshunt. If we also consider
the unfortunate left-turns that Ward stubbornly took in his zeal to achieve artistic recognition; decisions
based more on a desire for fame than on refining his own unique talents, it is unsurprising that Ward’s
formerly brilliant reputation as a painter began to wane, even by the 1830’s.

Ward could never be considered a failure in the same way as his spectacularly self-destructive
contemporary, Benjamin Haydon,15 but the last twelve years of his career stand in stark contrast to those
of several other artists who were directly influenced by him, including Landseer, Géricault and Eugéne
Delacroix. By the 1840s, health problems, superstitions and eccentricities had begun to take their toll
on Ward’s technical and mental abilities, and while he continued to exhibit regularly at the Royal
Academy and the British Institution until 1852, his increasingly mannered style and clumsy
compositions resulted in works which differ vastly from his earlier ground-breaking achievements. His
career transition from the top of his profession to poverty and obscurity in Hertfordshire resulted from
a collision between bad luck and the terrible professional judgement of a uniquely gifted personality.
With this in mind, a biographical sketch of Ward is essential to understand how he came to paint such
a rare masterpiece as Lioness with a Heron, and just how important is his contribution to nineteenth
century art.

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