Joseph Wolf
He moved to the British Museum in 1848 and became the preferred illustrator for explorers and naturalists including David Livingstone, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates.[3] In his boyhood he assiduously studied bird and animal life, and showed a remarkable capacity as a draughtsman of natural history subjects.He took a special interest in birds of prey, and considered art as a career but realized at the age of sixteen that he needed more training to be professional.[9] Kaup was impressed by his abilities and took one of Wolf's sketchbooks to a meeting in Leyden to show to Hermann Schlegel at the Natural History Museum, Leiden.As a fit young man with sharp-shooting abilities he could not be rejected, but it was peacetime and the surgeon, who knew him, helped him avoid recruitment under the pretext of a weak chest.[19] 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 was commissioned by the Zoological Society of London to paint a watercolour of wapiti deer in the snow; it is dated January 1881.[21]Wolf joined an association called the German Athenaeum which was founded in 1869 and members met for scientific, literary and musical evenings.Wolf established wildlife art as a genre and his observation of living birds allowed him to produce illustrations in very accurate and lifelike stances.[27] Wolf made numerous drawings in pen and charcoal as well as lithographs for scholarly societies such as the Zoological Society of London (he produced 340 "attractive" colour plates for the ZSL Proceedings in the course of 30 years),[11] and a very large number of illustrations for books on natural history and travel published from various countries;[4] and was considerably successful as a painter as well.
Joseph A. WolfEurasian hobbyNatural historyartistDavid LivingstoneAlfred Russel WallaceHenry Walter BatesEdwin LandseerDaubentonia madagascariensisfarmerRandolph Michael ProbstfieldMünstermaifeldMoselleanimalstone martenlithographersKoblenzJohann Conrad SusemihlFrankfurtEduard RüppellDarmstadtJohann Jakob KaupHermann SchlegelNatural History Museum, Leidenblack grouseGeorge Robert GrayDavid William MitchellTrübnerBritish MuseumJ. O. WestwoodPre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodJohn GouldZoological Society of LondonwapitiThe Naturalist on the River AmazonsCircus approximansFranco-Prussian WarAbraham Dee Bartlettwildlife artAlfred NewtonpyramidHighgate Cemeterypublic domainChisholm, HughEncyclopædia BritannicaMoreau, R.E.Internet Archive