Joseph Wolf was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 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.

Germany

Wolf was the oldest son of a farmer

Farmer

A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, who raises living organisms for food or raw materials, generally including livestock husbandry and growing crops, such as produce and grain...

, Anton Wolf and was born in Mörz near Münstermaifeld

Münstermaifeld

Münstermaifeld is a town in the district Mayen-Koblenz, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is part of the Verbandsgemeinde Maifeld. It is situated south-east of Mayen, a few km from the Moselle River and the castle Eltz. The first residents of the region were Celts...

 then in Rhenish Prussia, not far from the river Moselle

Moselle

Moselle is a department in the east of France named after the river Moselle.- History :Moselle is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on March 4, 1790...

, in the Eifel

Eifel

The Eifel is a low mountain range in western Germany and eastern Belgium. It occupies parts of southwestern North Rhine-Westphalia, northwestern Rhineland-Palatinate and the south of the German-speaking Community of Belgium....

 region. In his boyhood he was an assiduous student of bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

 and animal

Animal

Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...

 life, and showed a remarkable capacity as a draughtsman of natural history

Natural history

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...

 subjects. He showed an early talent for art by cutting paper silhouettes of birds and animals which he pasted on to windows. 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 a career art but he realized at the age of sixteen that he needed more training to become a professional and with support from his father he joined as an apprentice to a firm of lithographers., Gebruder Becker at Koblenz

Koblenz

Koblenz is a German city situated on both banks of the Rhine at its confluence with the Moselle, where the Deutsches Eck and its monument are situated.As Koblenz was one of the military posts established by Drusus about 8 BC, the...

. Here he found his first illustrated ornithology book (by Johann Conrad Susemihl

Johann Conrad Susemihl

Johann Conrad Susemihl , was a German copperplate engraver and artist noted for his images of natural history, landscapes and architecture....

, 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. 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.

He travelled to Frankfurt

Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...

 and introduced himself as a lithographer to Eduard Rüppell

Eduard Rüppell

Wilhelm Peter Eduard Simon Rüppell was a German naturalist and explorer. Rüppell is occasionally transliterated to "Rueppell" for the English alphabet....

. 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

Darmstadt

Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Rhine Main Area.The sandy soils in the Darmstadt area, ill-suited for agriculture in times before industrial fertilisation, prevented any larger settlement from developing, until the city became the seat...

 where he suggested Wolf could work for Johann Jakob Kaup

Johann Jakob Kaup

Johann Jakob Kaup was a German naturalist.-Biography:He was born at Darmstadt. After studying at Göttingen and Heidelberg he spent two years at Leiden, where his attention was specially devoted to the amphibians and fishes. He then returned to Darmstadt as an assistant in the grand ducal museum,...

. Wolf moved to Darmstadt but continued to work for Rüppell's The Birds of North-East Africa. 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

Hermann Schlegel

Hermann Schlegel was a German ornithologist and herpetologist.-Early life and education:Schlegel was born at Altenburg, the son of a brassfounder. His father collected butterflies, which stimulated Schlegel's interest in natural history...

 at the Natural History Museum, Leiden who immediately commissioned him to work on some plates to be used in Traite de Fauconnerie. 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. 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. 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

George Robert Gray

George Robert Gray FRS was an English zoologist and author, and head of the ornithological section of the British Museum, now the Natural History Museum, in London for forty-one years...

.

London

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. While at work in the insect room of the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

, he met other naturalists including J O Westwood

John Obadiah Westwood

John Obadiah Westwood was an English entomologist and archaeologist also noted for his artistic talents.Born in Sheffield, he studied to be a lawyer but abandoned that for his scientific interests....

 with whom he could converse in French. 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

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...

 of London.

John Gould

John Gould

John Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. The Gould League in Australia was named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" played a role in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...

 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. Wolf thought of Gould as a shrewd and uncouth man. 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.

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. 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. Wolf held his own opinions on reliability of observations of others and he even had doubts about Darwin's interpretation of the face of a monkey as a "laugh". Wolf was sometimes visited by Darwin and he appreciated Darwin for being a very approachable person that even "a child could talk to".

Achievements

Joseph Wolf's abilities were widely acclaimed even in his lifetime. Wolf established wildlife art

Wildlife art

Wildlife art is one of humanity's earliest art forms, dating back to prehistoric cave paintings such as those found at the grotto of Lascaux in France....

 as a genre

Genre

Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...

 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. 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. 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

Zoological Society of London

The Zoological Society of London is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats...

, 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. In 1865 J H Gurney named a species harrier after Wolf but this was found to be an already described species.

He died in London, surrounded by his pet birds. He is buried in Highgate cemetery.

In 2002, in Joseph Wolf's honour, a new road "Joseph Wolf Weg" in Mörz was named after the artist.

External links

• Biography on the Natural History Museum website