Footnotes

Provenance
Sir George Buckston Browne (1850 - 1945)
By descent to Sir Hugh Lett, who married George Buckston Browne's daughter
Private collection, UK

Joseph Wolf, RI (1820-1899) was the greatest naturalist painter and illustrator of his generation. Born in Germany, Wolf worked for the British Museum from 1848, and contributed drawings to many important Ornithological publications, including John Gould's Birds of Great Britain and Birds of Asia.

Wolf's work was widely admired; Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) described him as 'without exception, the best all-round animal artist who ever lived', while Charles Darwin noted his 'intimate study of veritable fact and detail - the positive forms, instincts, and habits, the minutiae of furs and plumages'. The Pre-Raphaelites admired his attention to detail and his insistence on painting from nature, and his work was a huge influence on many British wildlife painters, not least Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935), whose early studies of birds of prey were occasionally inscribed 'after J. Wolf'.

Wolf was also befriended by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917). Both men had studios in Primrose Hill, as did William Logsdail, a life-long friend of Waterhouse. Both Wolf and Waterhouse, together with other prominent Victorian artists such as Tom Lloyd and Lance Calkin, feature as models in Logsdail's major work Bank and the Royal Exchange (Royal Academy, 1887, no.723), where they appear on the top of the bus in the lower right foreground. In a letter written by Logsdail to a patron, the artist notes that 'the portrait figures on the bus [were] treated with almost the finish of careful miniature work'¹. Wolf features in the second row, reading a newspaper, and wearing a grey suit and black top-hat.

The present lot, once in the collection of the prominent surgeon Sir George Buckston Browne, shows Wolf holding a traditional German pipe.

¹Sotheby's London, 13 July 2010, notes to lot 102