Page 41 - James Ward - A Lioness with a Heron

19 William, who was now nearly at the end of his own apprenticeship, may have wanted to secure his younger brother’s skills for himself.
Equally, he may have acted out of familial responsibility. However, by this time William was acknowledged as one of the best engravers working
in London, so while his arrangement with Smith provided a situation for James, it also significantly compromised William’s own earning
potential.
20 This was not light work, because the plates were made from disused rollers from cotton mills, and Ward would have had to thoroughly excise
and roughen the metal with a curved and serrated tool known as a rocker. The resulting surface, the burr of the plate and the foundation of the
engraving, could then be alternately scraped down, built up and stopped out, depending on the lightness or depth of tone required for the finished
image. See Beckett, op. cit., pp. 9-10.
21 Grundy, op. cit., p. XVI.
22 It did not bode well for their hopes that when the wedding took place in 1786 at a Hammersmith church the groom brought two pistols to
the ceremony. See G. Fussell, op. cit., p. 46.
23 Both Grundy and Beckett relate that the two artists regularly went armed and could be irresponsible to the point of menace with guns. Once
they disguised themselves as highwaymen to play a prank on Ward’s father, terrifying the drunken old man. They also amused themselves by
waiting until Ward Sr. had fallen asleep and then used his bedroom door for target practice. See Grundy, op. cit., p. XVIII-XIX; and see Beckett,
op. cit., p. 20; see also H. C. W. Angelo, The Reminiscences of Henry Angelo..., London, 1830, vol. II, pp. 189-190.
24 Examples include An Old Grey Horse and an Ass (c. 1791-93), Victoria and Albert Museum, London; also Rustic Felicity (1792) and The
Rocking Horse (1793), published by Thos. Simpson, London. See Munro, op. cit. p. 6.
25 A copy is in the Print Room of the Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 95.G.10. See also Munro, op. cit., p. 6.
26 Grundy, op. cit., pp. XIX-XX.
27 Through his friendship with the art dealer Michael Bryan, Ward gained access in the late 1790s to the Orléans collection, which had recently
arrived from Revolutionary France. Bryan exhibited the collection on Pall Mall prior to its sale around 1798 and commissioned Ward to engrave
several works, including Rubens’s Diana and Her Nymphs (now in the Cleveland Art Museum). Ward also painted a portrait of the Bryan family
(c. 1797-8, Laing City Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne), in which critics noted his use of Titianesque colour. See Munro, op. cit., p. 10,
under note 8; see also E. Nygren, ‘James Ward’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004-2010.
28 In 1769, only six engravers were admitted to the Academy, and then only at the inferior level of Associate Member. See Munro, op. cit., p.
10, note 2. Later, Ward even wrote: ‘I Engrave to live & painted from my love for the art’. See Munro, op. cit., p. 5, note 4. However, Ward’s
reaction to his royal appointment may have arisen out of more than his thwarted ambition to become a painter: Britain had declared war on
France the previous year, effectively cutting off England from the very lucrative continental print market, and thus significantly limiting Ward’s
earning potential as an engraver.
29 Cayne Waterfall, Merioneth, North Wales (copy after Thomas Girtin), watercolour, London, British Museum; see Nygren, op. cit., p. 15.
30 See E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757 [2nd ed., 1759], p. 57, p. 65, and p. 82.
31 In 1801 Ward began a project for the Board of Agriculture in cooperation with the print publisher Josiah Boydell to illustrate different aspects
of farm animals in England, Scotland and Wales. However, the project was stopped in 1807 due to a lack of funds.
32 Cattle by a River , signed and dated ‘J. Ward 1798’, oil on panel, 45.2 x 60.4 cm (17 ¾ x 23 ¾ in), Christie’s King Street, 8 July 2009, lot 194.
33 Potter’s painting was criticized during his lifetime, but by the 19th century had come to be recognized as a precursor to Romantic genre
painting.
34 Published by Darling & Thompson, London, 1795 (British Museum, inv. no. 1938.0115.16).
35 Formerly with Hall & Knight, Ltd., London; included in their exhibition Fearful Symmetry, The Art of George Stubbs, Painter of the English
Establishment, 2000.
36 In the First Mysore War (1766-1769), Hyder Ali defeated the British, whose aspirations to expand the East India Company’s territories were
a dealt a severe blow. In the Second Mysore War (1780-1784), Tipu again defeated the British and their allies. The war ended in 1784 with the
Treaty of Mangalore in which both sides agreed to restore the other’s lands to their status prior to the war. In the Third Mysore War (1789-
1792), Tipu was resoundingly defeated, and with the signing of the Treaty of Seringapatam, the Kingdom of Mysore was forced to surrender
half its territories.
37 Ward and Northcote agreed that Stubbs possessed an exceptional talent for exotic animal subjects, stating that he was the only painter who

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