Page 28 - James Ward - A Lioness with a Heron

knot arrangement of the battling animals in the 1797 picture recalls such works as Stubbs’s Horse attacked
by a Lion (versions in National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; New Haven, Yale Centre for British
Art, and elsewhere).

By the 1790s Ward was determined to make his mark as a painter, and it is possible that his 1793 and
1797 pictures were motivated at least partly by his ambition to inherit Stubbs’s market for such
paintings. However, these works also illustrate a keen understanding of how Stubbs achieved a balance
between the sublime and the objective, employing the former exclusively in his landscape settings, while
reserving the latter for depicting wild animals. The British Museum holds a bound series of crayon manier
engravings made after Ward’s sketches, published in 1795,34 which includes a study of a lioness at the
entrance to her den in a pose and composition very similar to that of Stubbs’s Lioness and Lion in a Rocky
Cave (Fig. 6).35 Painted in 1774, Stubbs’s picture shows a cave interior with a recumbent lioness. Her
head is lifted and turned in profile to the right as she senses the presence of her mate, a shadowy form
emerging in the right-hand background, framed in the den’s jagged entrance against a sunlight
mountain landscape. In Lioness with a Heron, Ward employs a tighter composition and a more
ambiguous landscape, and the dynamic between the two animals is one of combat rather than reaction,
but the formal similarities between these two works, separated by over forty years, illustrate not only
how strong the influence of Stubbs was on Ward’s early lion and tiger subjects, but also how this
influence continued even to the peak of Ward’s career.

Moreover, A Tiger Disturbed by a Lion and A Lion and a Tiger Fighting are important examples of how
Ward first used animal subjects to create specific allegories. Ward conceived the two works as a tribute
to England’s victory at the end of the third of the four Mysore Wars fought between the British East
India Company and the Kingdom of Mysore, which was led by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. In the
1793 picture, Ward depicts the tiger of India arrested in the act of devouring a small deer or antelope
as it senses the approach of the British lion. In the immediate foreground, Ward includes a skull from
a previous kill to allude to previous victories by the Kingdom of Mysore against the British and Mysore’s
neighbouring states.36 The second print, A Lion and a Tiger Fighting, is an allegory celebrating British
victory over Tipu Sultan and his resistance to the expansion of the East India Company’s trading empire
in India.

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