Page 39 - James Ward - A Lioness with a Heron

including an Adoration of the Magi by Quentin Massys, which between 1882 and 1900 was sold to
Rodolphe Kann.60 It is possible that Hughes himself sold Lioness with a Heron to the railway magnate
and art connoisseur, James Staats Forbes, who owned the picture from at least 1894, when he lent it to
the Guildhall exhibition, until his death in 1904. The painting was sold twelve years later in one of
Forbes’s posthumous sales at Christie’s, to ‘Mr. Buck’, who was possibly a picture dealer. Lioness with
a Heron then passed into the collection of Mrs. Marion Green, and after her death was sold in 1925 by
executors in the Pall Mall rooms of Robinson Fisher & Harding.

By 1959, the picture had passed to the John Nicholson Gallery in New York, who probably sold the
picture directly to Luis A. Ferré for his new Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico.61 Ferré, a Puerto
Rican industrialist, politician and philanthropist, began to form his collection in 1956 after a trip to
Europe had sparked a passion for collecting old master paintings. He decided to establish a museum
in his hometown of Ponce and enlisted Julius S. Held, a renowned specialist on Rubens, to advise him
on acquisitions: these included Ward’s Lioness with a Heron. Ferré’s chief criteria in assembling the
Ponce collection were that the works should be of the highest quality, condition and aesthetic appeal;
name recognition or an artist’s popular appeal were secondary concerns. In 1959, the museum first
opened to the public at a small colonial house on Cristina Street. As the museum gained renown and
the collections expanded more space was needed, so Ferré acquired part of Avenidas Las Americas,
and commissioned US architect Edward Durrell Stone to design the new museum. Construction began
in the spring of 1964 and the museum officially opened to the public on December 28, 1965. In addition
to masterpieces of Italian and French art and a significant collection of Spanish baroque paintings, the
Ponce museum holds one of the most important collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the western
hemisphere, including Flaming June by Frederic Leighton,1st Baron Leighton and The Last Sleep of
Arthur in Avalon by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. In 2010, a major renovation and expansion of the
museum precipitated the organisation of a travelling exhibition of fifty highlights from the collection,
including Lioness with a Heron. The exhibition, Masterpieces of European Painting from Museo de Arte de
Ponce, was organized as a tribute to Ferré’s vision as a collector and his commitment to the collection
he built for the people of Puerto Rico. Many of the paintings included in the exhibition had never been
shown outside of Puerto Rico since their acquisition. After the exhibition closed in 2010, the museum
decided to de-accession a small part of their collection to fund future acquisitions and projects, many
of which would now focus on North American and Latin American contemporary art.

t