Joseph Wolf (German, 1820-1899)
European Goshawk (Adult Female)
Partial study for John Gould’s Birds of Great Britain, Vol. I, Pl. 9
Watercolor and gouache on paper
Signed ‘J Wolf’ lower right, dated 1861
Paper size: 26 x 17 3/4 in. Frame size: 34 x 25 1/2 in.

An adult female Goshawk sits deep in the crown of a Scots pine, her body turned three-quarters away from the viewer and her head turned into sharp profile so that the eye, a hot orange-yellow ringed in black, catches what little light there is. She is watching. Wolf has placed her at the precise point where cover ends and open country begins. To the left, beyond the last screen of needles, a pale plain recedes under a low and smoky sky, its middle distance broken by scattered conifers; to the right, the pine closes in again, dense and unlit. 

The slate gray of the mantle and folded wing is laid in broadly and then largely left alone, so that the bird’s mass reads as a single dark silhouette against the warmer browns of the bole behind her. Set against that reserve, the barring of the underparts is drawn almost feather by feather in fine opaque strokes, each bar faintly irregular, following the swell of the breast and flank rather than lying flat upon it. The undertail coverts are built up in bodycolor to a soft, woolly bloom, and the yellow tarsi and toes, closed on a lichened bough, supply the only note of fully saturated color in the sheet. The pine needles are struck in with a dry brush over dark washes, which gives them their bristling, backlit quality and keeps the foreground from hardening into a pattern.

The Birds of Great Britain appeared in twenty-five parts between 1862 and 1873, forming five volumes with 367 hand-colored lithographic plates. By this stage of his career, Gould rarely carried a composition to a finished state himself; he set the program, supplied specimens and field data, and relied on a small circle of artists, among whom Wolf was the most gifted. Wolf’s designs were transferred to stone by Henry Constantine Richter and William Hart and colored by hand under Gould’s supervision. The present sheet is dated 1861, before the first part was issued, which places it among the earliest work undertaken for the publication and at the very beginning of the raptors that open volume 1.

The published plate 9 shows the adult female accompanied by “a reduced figure of a young bird in the distance,” a device Gould favored because it allowed a single sheet to carry both plumages of a species in which the two differ dramatically. In this watercolor, the young bird is absent, and an open landscape occupies its place. The difference is one of kind rather than degree. Here, comparison gives way to a study of a predator in its covert, with the far horizon supplying atmosphere and scale instead of a second specimen. Whether the change originated with Wolf or was imposed by Gould cannot be determined from the sheet alone, though Palmer leaves the reader in no doubt that Wolf resented having his designs adjusted by others. What the sheet does establish is that the landscape solution came first, and that the comparative figure was a later editorial addition to a composition already complete.

Gould’s letterpress for plate 9 is among the liveliest in the work, calling the Goshawk a “truly noble species of Hawk” and is candid about the difficulty of the British record, observing that a pair might establish themselves, breed, and rear young in one season only to be destroyed by a keeper in the next, with a long interval passing before others arrived from the great nurseries of France, Germany, and Scandinavia. He also records handling two exceptional birds in the flesh: an immature female shot at Somerleyton, Suffolk, in January 1859, which weighed two pounds fourteen ounces and had been raiding farm steadings with startling boldness, and an adult female from Normanby Park, Lincolnshire, taken in March 1864, which exceeded four pounds and was so broad-shouldered that it put Gould in mind of a Chilean eagle rather than a Goshawk.

Two passages bear directly on the drawing. The first concerns habitat. Gould notes that the species breeds northward as far as the Scots fir extends, and his British localities are the old Caledonian pine forests: Darnaway, Glenmore, Rothiemurchus, Abernethy, and the woods of Castle Grant on Speyside. Wolf’s choice of a Scots pine, and the belt of conifers along his horizon, is therefore not generic scenery but an argument about where the bird belongs. The second concerns conduct in which Gould describes the Goshawk as never hovering like the Kestrel and seldom mounting high like the falcons but sitting motionless for hours under the shadowy canopy of a leafy tree, close to the bole rather than on the exposed branches, from which it scans the surrounding space and steals upon its prey which Wolf has painted exactly with the bird tight against the trunk, half absorbed into the shadow, with only the barred breast and the eye declaring her.

Gould credits Wolf by name in the same text, reporting that the artist had known a Goshawk, when pressed by hunger, to dash out of its retreat and give chase to a Short-eared Owl. The remark shows Wolf functioning as one of Gould’s informants on behavior rather than merely as the hand that drew the plate, and it helps explain why his birds of prey persuade where so many Victorian raptors do not.

Wolf’s original designs for Gould rarely come to market, the greater part having long since passed into institutional hands, and among them, the raptors have always been the most sought after, since they are the subjects in which his early falconry training and his lifelong habit of watching living animals tell most plainly.

JOSEPH WOLF (GERMAN, 1820-1899)

Sir Edwin Landseer described Joseph Wolf as “...without exception the best all-round animal painter who ever lived.” Born and educated in Prussia, Wolf left home at the age of 16 and apprenticed himself to the lithographic firm of Gebruder Becker in Coblenz, where he first met his future patron Hermann Schlegel, then the assistant keeper at the museum in Leyden and a prolific author of ornithological works. After brief spells in Frankfurt and Darmstadt, Wolf went to Holland and settled in Leyden in 1840; he was soon at work on the illustrations for Traite de Fauconnerie by Schlegel and Wulverhorst. Working on this book on falconry, Wolf became an expert at portraying birds of prey, a flawless skill of representation that is in full evidence in his watercolors.

After developing contact with John Gould, Wolf established himself in London in 1848, where he exhibited at the Royal Academy, met Edwin Landseer and other animal artists, and won the patronage of discerning collectors like the Duke of Argyll and Lord Derby. He quickly became the foremost animal illustrator in Britain. Wolf had a long and productive relationship with Gould, contributing plates to The Birds of Asia and The Birds of Great Britain, and Gould became a frequent visitor to Wolf’s studio. The rapidity of the growth of his reputation was due, according to his biographer A.H. Palmer, to his power “of revivifying a dried skin and not merely revivifying, but showing the most characteristic and beautiful attitude and expression of the living bird or animal.” However, Wolf did not wish to be categorized as a scientific illustrator, preferring to create complete and naturalistic compositions which conveyed a sense of drama and mystery. Rather than show his subjects isolated from their environment, he integrated them into a natural setting and portrayed them involved in dramatic action. This combination of animation and beauty characterizes Wolf’s watercolors.

In 1852, the British Zoological Society commissioned Wolf to complete several watercolors for its Zoological Sketches published in parts between 1856 and 1867. P.L. Sclater, the secretary of the society, noted in the publication’s preface, “the Council was fortunate enough to secure the services of Mr Joseph Wolf, who may be fairly said to stand alone in intimate knowledge of the habits and forms of Mammals and Birds.” By this stage in his career, Wolf’s works were in considerable demand both in their own right and as illustrations to books and journals. From 1859 to 1869 he was the regular artist for Ibis, the journal of the Zoological Society, and his work was also reproduced in the Illustrated London News, Once a Week, The Leisure Hour, The Sunday at Home, and The Graphic. Unfortunately, during the 1870s, Wolf was increasingly hindered by the onset of chronic rheumatism, which gradually curtailed his work, but he lived on into his eightieth year and died in London surrounded by his pet birds and held in high popular esteem. More than three-quarters of a century later his plates are regarded as among the finest productions of the great period of the illustrated book, while his oil paintings, watercolors and drawings are prized by museums and collectors alike.

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