Joseph Wolf

Animal drawings. [no dates]

120 original drawings mounted on card, up to 9 on a page, watercolour, ink, some charcoal and pencil sketches, loose in 2 contemporary book-style half morocco boxes, spotting, boxes bumped at extremities with upper joints cracked

AN EXCEPTIONAL COLLECTION OF ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE FATHER OF WILDLIFE ART.

Joseph Wolf was born in Mörz near Coblenz in Germany. He had an early interest in ornithology and would spend hours watching and drawing birds when a child. He was apprenticed for three years to the Brothers Becker, lithographers of Coblenz, and subsequently became a lithographer at Darmstadt. Shortly afterwards Wolf went to Antwerp in search of practical instruction in drawing, where he mainly painted ornithological studies. In 1848 he left Germany for London, where he obtained employment at the British Museum.

Wolf drew for a very large number of publications on natural history, two of the most important being John Gould's Birds of Great Britain and Birds of Asia, and he also worked for the Royal Zoological Society. He exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1849 and 1877 and at the Royal Institution in 1874. Many of his drawings of birds and animals are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.