Page 33 - James Ward - A Lioness with a Heron

© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Fig. 9

in action was such that he could focus primarily on the instinctive pose and movements of the lion and
apparently did not think it necessary to include its face.

However, the fact that Ward rejected physiognomy in the 1808 picture should not be taken as proof
that by this date natural science had completely eclipsed Rubensian models in his wild animal subjects.
Ward painted the ambitious Bulls fighting in a landscape, St. Donats Castle, Glamorgan (Fig. 3), in 1812
and did so in direct emulation of Rubens’s View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (National Gallery,
London), which he would have seen in the collection of Sir. George Beaumont. Ward painted this
work on two joined mahogany panels, although it is difficult to say whether this was an attempt to
imitate Rubens’s working methods.49 Here, Ward kept Rubens’s sky with dawn breaking through the
clouds, but transferred the castle and the framing effect of the trees from the left to the right background,
and replaced Rubens’s farmers and wagon in the left foreground of Het Steen with two massive bulls in
the right foreground. Ward painted one bull white and the other brown, their horns locked in a titanic

31