Joseph Wolf (German, 1820-1899)
“Little Owl (Athene noctua)”
Study for John Gould, The Birds of Great Britain, vol. 1, plate 37
Graphite and watercolor heightened with bodycolor and gum arabic, on wove paper
Inscribed: In graphite, lower right: “1. 3 4/p,” apparently a working or studio notation
ca. 1850
Paper size: 21 3/4 x 14 3/4 in Frame size: 31 x 24 in
Provenance: Thomas Littleton Powys, 4th Baron Lilford (1833–1896); Frederick DuCane Godman (1834–1919); thence by descent.

Few images in Victorian bird art hold the eye as directly as this one. The adult Little Owl faces the viewer squarely, drawn to life size, its lemon-yellow irises set in a broad, close-feathered facial disc that Wolf has built up from thousands of fine hair strokes. The bird is perched on a lichen-crusted bough at the mouth of a hollow trunk, one foot clamped over a freshly caught field vole. Behind and below, two nearly fledged owlets press together in the darkness of the nest hole, their gaze fixed on the same point as the adult’s. A trail of ivy climbs the left of the composition, and at the lower left, a wren, worked more summarily, peers out from among the leaves. The background is nothing more than a wash of pale blue and gray, fading into the untouched paper at every edge.

Wolf composed his subjects as episodes rather than specimens, and here he has caught a domestic moment in the life of a hunting bird when the prey is delivered, the young alert, the parent watchful. The three sets of eyes create a triangular structure that pulls the viewer into the sheet, an effect the artist exploited repeatedly and that his contemporaries found startling. Wolf had watched living owls at the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park and in the field, and he understood that an owl’s authority resides in the set of the head and the softness of the plumage rather than in the accuracy of a mounted skin.

Technically, the sheet is a fine demonstration of Wolf’s working method, with crisp graphite underdrawing visible at the contours of the bough and in the ivy stems. Watercolor is laid in thin, controlled washes, with the barred and spotted plumage stippled feather by feather in a drier, darker pigment. Opaque bodycolor supplies the white ocelli of the breast and the highlights along the scapulars, while gum arabic has been brushed selectively over the eyes, the cere, and the darkest passages of the wing to lend them a wet, saturated depth that reads even at a distance. The vole is handled with the same care as the owl, its fur described in short directional strokes and its long incisors just visible.

Joseph Wolf arrived in London in 1848, having trained as a lithographer at Coblenz and then worked in Leiden alongside Hermann Schlegel. Within a year, he was supplying John Gould with drawings, a collaboration that would run for more than three decades across The Birds of Great Britain and The Birds of Asia. Wolf worked freelance, kept his own studio and his own exhibiting career at the Royal Academy, and made no secret of his reservations about Gould’s commercial instincts and about the bright tints his colorists applied to the finished plates. Gould, for his part, considered him indispensable and reserved the raptors and owls for him whenever he could.

Gould’s practice was to make rough compositional sketches himself and hand them to his artists, who produced the finished drawings that were then transferred to stone, usually by Henry Constantine Richter or William Matthew Hart, and hand-colored after printing. Sheets of this kind, therefore, occupy the pivotal position in the making of a Gould plate. This composition was drawn on stone for plate 37 of the first volume of The Birds of Great Britain, issued in twenty-five parts between 1862 and 1873, and, with 468 subscribers, the most successful of all Gould’s undertakings. In the accompanying letterpress, Gould wrote:

The Plate represents the bird, of natural size, with the nearly fledged young, from a drawing by Mr. Wolf. The little quadruped is the Short-tailed Field Mouse (Arvicola agrestis).

The rodent is the field vole, described in the nineteenth century under Arvicola agrestis and now placed in Microtus agrestis. The field vole is the staple prey of the species across much of its range, and Wolf, who insisted that an animal be shown doing something it actually does, would have regarded the detail as essential to an understanding of the species.

When Gould published the plate, the Little Owl was not a British bird. It had no fossil or historical record in these islands and appeared only as a scarce and much-doubted vagrant to the southern counties; an attempt by Charles Waterton to establish birds brought from Italy at Walton Hall in Yorkshire in the early 1840s had failed entirely. Gould’s account accordingly treats the species as a continental one whose British claims required scrutiny. The bird owes its present place in the English countryside to two landowners. Edmund Meade-Waldo released birds in Kent from 1874, where they first bred in 1879, and Lord Lilford released Dutch-caught owls annually at Lilford Hall in Northamptonshire through the 1880s, with the first wild breeding recorded there in 1889. Lilford described them in his own writings as “most amusing birds,” and for a period they were known in England as Lilford’s owl. From these two sources, the species colonized most of England and Wales within fifty years. That this drawing of the species passed through Lilford’s hands well before he began his releases gives it an unusual double interest, both ornithological and artistic.

Thomas Littleton Powys, 4th Baron Lilford, was among the founders of the British Ornithologists’ Union in 1858 and one of the most serious field ornithologists of his generation, with a celebrated collection of living birds in the aviaries at Lilford Hall and long experience of the Mediterranean avifauna. He assembled an important group of original drawings by the artists who supplied Gould, of which this is one.

Frederick DuCane Godman, likewise a founding member of the Union and, with Osbert Salvin, the author of the monumental Biologia Centrali-Americana (1879–1915), was among the great British natural history collectors of the age. Drawings bearing this pairing of names constitute a small and coherent group, and their appearance on the market has been infrequent. The distinguished line of ownership adds materially to the piece, since original Wolf drawings for Gould are held in quantity by only a handful of institutions, notably the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas.

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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