Page 38 - James Ward - A Lioness with a Heron

Ward must have sold A Lioness with a Heron to Thomas Garle no later than the latter part of
1826, as it was published that year in the November issue of The Sporting Magazine among
a list of works by Ward owned by royal and other notable racing enthusiasts, including
Garle. In the opening article of that particular issue, an engraving after Ward’s portrait by John Jackson
was followed by a brief tribute to him as a sporting painter, and a list of pictures arranged by owner,
among them George IV, Sir Thomas Lawrence, the Duke of York, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of
Northumberland, Viscount Clive, Ralph Lambton, and Theophilus Levett.59

By the second decade of the nineteenth century Ward had made his name as a painter of bloodstock,
the successor to Stubbs and Gilpin. He began to exhibit portraits of thoroughbreds around 1809, when
he exhibited Granadillo and her colt, Skyscraper at the Royal Academy. Garle also owned this work, which
is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Virginia. Ward had befriended Garle at least by 1807, and he
became one of Ward’s earliest and most supportive patrons. A warm correspondence continued between
the two men, even after a stroke in 1852 left Ward incapacitated and his handwriting all but
indecipherable. Also listed in Garle’s possession by this time were other portraits of bloodstock, such
as Eagle (now in the Yale Center for British Art), genre scenes such as The Farrier’s Shop and Airing the
Hounds, portraits of Garle’s son and his hounds, and ‘numerous others’. Upon Garle’s death in 1862,
the picture was included in his posthumous sale held at Christie’s, where it was acquired by Messrs.
P. & D. Colnaghi.

Colnaghi then possibly sold the picture to Hugh Robert Hughes of Kinmel Hall in North Wales, who
must have acquired the work by 1884, when he lent it to the Royal Academy’s winter exhibition. In
1852 Hughes had inherited Kinmel Hall, situated on vast holdings in Denbighshire, the product of
centuries of wealth based on copper mining, after his childless cousin, the 2nd Lord Dunrobin, was
declared insane, taking the family title with him. Nicknamed ‘HRH’, a pun on his initials and the
lavish lifestyle for which he was known, Hughes embarked upon a massive building programme, using
the famed architect William Eden Nesfield to build a new Kinmel Hall, to replace the earlier Palladian
structure which had burned to the ground in 1840. Hughes’s new home was completed in 1876 and
included 52 bedrooms, quarters for sixty servants and even a room solely used for ironing the
newspapers. By the time of his death in 1911, Hughes had spent most of the family fortune, and death
duties subsequently took a great deal of what remained. Hughes had owned a number of pictures,

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