35 Facts About Joseph Wolf

Joseph Wolf was a German artist who specialized in natural history illustration.

Joseph Wolf 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.

Joseph Wolf was born in Morz, near Munstermaifeld, then in Rhenish Prussia, not far from the river Moselle, in the Eifel region.

Joseph Wolf was originally called Mathias but later went by the name of Joseph.

Joseph Wolf showed an early talent for art by cutting paper silhouettes of birds and animals which he pasted onto windows.

Joseph Wolf made himself brushes from the fur of a stone marten, and drew illustrations of birds that he raised from the nest or found near his home.

Joseph Wolf 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.

Joseph Wolf 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.

Joseph Wolf travelled to Frankfurt and introduced himself as a lithographer to the ornithologist Eduard Ruppell.

Joseph Wolf moved to Darmstadt but went on working on Ruppell's The Birds of North-East Africa.

At the age of 20, Joseph Wolf was to appear at Maien to join the Army.

Back in Darmstadt, Joseph Wolf went on working on bird plates, and joined an art school where he worked on portraits, landscapes and copying of works in the Darmstadt Gallery.

Joseph Wolf was a keen observer of wild birds and once had a pit dug in which he sat all day to watch the courtship of black grouse.

Around this time, Kaup visited the British Museum, he was asked about the German artist who did the plates for Schlegel's book, and Joseph Wolf was invited to London to illustrate the genera of birds for a book by George Robert Gray.

Joseph Wolf travelled to London on 20 March 1848 on the Soho, and was introduced by David William Mitchell, an amateur illustrator himself and a secretary of the Zoological Society of London, to Trubner of Longmans publishing.

Joseph Wolf was a friend of William Russell, an accountant and a Campbell related to the Duke of Argyll.

Joseph Wolf's paintings were appreciated by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of London.

Joseph Wolf 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.

Joseph Wolf was commissioned by the Zoological Society of London to paint a watercolour of wapiti deer in the snow; it is dated January 1881.

Joseph Wolf soon became the illustrator of choice for all the books published by returning adventurers like David Livingstone, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates.

Joseph Wolf joined an association called the German Athenaeum which was founded in 1869 and members met for scientific, literary and musical evenings.

Joseph Wolf became treasurer to a fund for German widows during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Joseph Wolf rendered the image in a design called "Peace and War" with turtle doves on a bush over a soldier's helmet.

Joseph Wolf 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 by Abraham Dee Bartlett, the zoo superintendent, to the abilities of Joseph Wolf in illustrating minute details of animals in action.

Darwin requested Joseph Wolf to make some illustrations from photographs and living animals in the zoological garden.

Joseph Wolf held his own opinions on the reliability of others' observations and even doubted Darwin's interpretation of the face of a monkey as a "laugh".

Darwin visited him on several occasions and Joseph Wolf appreciated him for being very approachable, someone that even "a child could talk to".

Joseph Wolf established wildlife art as a genre and his observation of living birds allowed him to produce illustrations in very accurate and lifelike stances.

Joseph Wolf 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.

The zoologist Alfred Newton called him "the greatest of all animal painters", while Landseer said that Joseph Wolf must have been a bird before he became a man.

Joseph Wolf made numerous drawings in pen and charcoal as well as lithographs for scholarly societies such as the Zoological Society of London, and a very large number of illustrations for books on natural history and travel published from various countries; and was considerably successful as a painter as well.

Joseph Wolf is buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.

In 2002, a new road in Morz, "Joseph Wolf Weg", was named after the artist.

Joseph Wolf's bicentenary was celebrated with a "Joseph Wolf year" in Morz in January 2020.