Joseph Wolf (January 21, 1820[1] - April 20, 1899) was a German artist who specialized in natural history illustration. He moved to the British Museum in 1848 and became the choice of illustrator for numerous explorers and collectors. He depicted animals accurately in life-like postures and has been considered one of the great pioneers of wildlife art. Sir Edwin Landseer considered him ...without exception, the best all-round animal artist who ever lived.
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Wolf was the oldest son of a farmer, Anton Wolf and was born in Mörz near Münstermaifeld then in Rhenish Prussia, not far from the river Moselle, in the Eifel region. In his boyhood he was an assiduous student of bird and animal life, and showed a remarkable capacity as a draughtsman of natural history subjects. He showed an early talent for art by cutting paper silhouettes of birds and animals which he pasted on to windows.[2] The village folk termed him as a "bird fool" (Vögelfanger). He later took an interest in hunting. From the hairs of a stone marten, he made himself brushes and drew illustrations of birds that he raised from the nest or found near his home. He took a special interest in the birds of prey and was interested in art as a career but realized at the age of sixteen that he needed more training to be professional and with support from his father joined as an apprentice to a firm of lithographers., Gebruder Becker at Koblenz.[3] Here he found his first illustrated ornithology book (by Johann Conrad Susemihl, a later edition of which made use of plates by Wolf himself) in the collection of a trader with an interest in birds and was surprised by the poor quality of the plates.[4] He returned home after three years of apprenticeship and for a while took up a temporary job with the village headman in searching homes for illegally concealed liquor.[5]
He travelled to Frankfurt and introduced himself as a lithographer to Eduard Rüppell. Rüppell was just beginning to work on the birds of Abyssinia and he encouraged Wolf to work for him either by living in Frankfurt or Darmstadt where he suggested Wolf could work for Johann Jakob Kaup. Wolf moved to Darmstadt but continued to work for Rüppell's The Birds of North-East Africa.[6] Kaup was very impressed by his abilities and when he went to Leyden for a meeting he took one of Wolf's sketchbooks and showed them to Hermann Schlegel at the Natural History Museum, Leiden who immediately commissioned him to work on some plates to be used in Traite de Fauconnerie.[7] At the age of 20 he was to appear at Maien for recruitment into the Army. As a fit young man with sharp-shooting abilities he could not be rejected, however it was peacetime and the surgeon who he knew well helped him avoid recruitment under the pretext of a weak chest.[8] Back in Darmstadt, he continued to work on bird plates and joined an art-school where he worked on portraits, landscapes and copying of works in the Darmstadt Gallery. He was also a keen observer of wild birds and one occasion had a pit dug in which he sat all day to observe the courtship of Blackgrouse.[9] In 1847, he left Darmstadt to join the Antwerp Academy to learn the Dutch oil painting techniques. Around this time, Kaup visited the British Museum, he was asked about the German artist who did the plates for Schlegel's book and this led to an invitation to work in London to illustrate a work on the genera of birds by George Robert Gray.[10]
Moving to London in 1848, he was introduced by D W Mitchell, an amateur illustrator himself, to Trübner of Longmans publishing and the very next day was set to work on Gray's The Genera of Birds.[11] While at work in the insect room of the British Museum, he met other naturalists including J O Westwood with whom he could converse in French.[12] He was a friend of William Russell, an accountant and a Campbell related to the Duke of Argyll. Russell brought Sir Edwin Landseer and the Duke of Argyll to see the works of Wolf. The Duke soon became a patron and he was also introduced to the Duke of Westminster. Wolf's paintings were also appreciated by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of London.[13]
John Gould admired Wolf and would have liked him on his staff, but Wolf only contributed illustrations on a freelance basis. Wolf accompanied Gould on a collection trip to Norway.[14] Wolf thought of Gould as a shrewd and uncouth man.[15] Wolf also noted that Gould lacked a knowledge of feather patterning apart from knowing nothing about composition with a tendency to add too much colour claiming that specimens in the wild were brighter.[16]
Wolf joined an association called the German Athenaeum which was founded in 1869 and members met for scientific, literary and musical evenings. For their exhibitions he worked on a range of compositions often with natural elements. His favourite medium was charcoal and ink. Wolf became treasurer to a fund for German widows during the First World War. After the war, he met Daniel Giraud Elliot in Paris and visited a battlefield. He rendered the image in a design called "Peace and War" with turtle doves on a bush over a soldier's helmet. He also produces some cartoon like illustrations including "Lecture on Embryology" in which he taunts certain men of science.[17] When Charles Darwin began his study of animal expressions, he was introduced to the abilities of Wolf. Darwin asked him to make some illustrations from photographs and living animals in the zoological garden. Wolf held his own opinions on the reliability of other's observations and even doubted Darwin's interpretation of the face of a monkey as a "laugh".[18] Darwin visited him on some ocassions and Wolf appreciated him for being a very approachable person, someone that even "a child could talk to".[19]
Joseph Wolf's abilities were widely acclaimed even in his lifetime. Wolf established wildlife art as a genre and his observation of living birds allowed him to produce illustrations in very accurate and life-like stances. On occasion he would come back from a trip and produce very accurate sketches from memory. He was very careful in his observation of feather patterns and when he read the works of Sundevall and Nitzsch on pterylography, he had nothing new to learn.[20] Professor Alfred Newton called him "the greatest of all animal painters" while Sir Landseer said that Wolf must have been a bird before he became a man.[21] He made numerous drawings in pen and charcola as well as numerous lithographs for publications of scholarly societies such as the Zoological Society of London, and a very large number of illustrations for books on natural history and on travel in various countries; but he also won a considerable success as a painter.[22] In 1865 J H Gurney named a species harrier after Wolf but this was found to be an already described species.[23]
He died in London, surrounded by his pet birds. He is buried in Highgate cemetery.[24]
In 2002, in Joseph Wolf's honour, a new road "Joseph Wolf Weg" in Mörz was named after the artist.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.