Beschreibung:

Taxidermy: A case of six pheasants with unusual plumage by Henry Ward circa 1880 104cm.; 41ins high by 152cm.; 60ins wide Rowland Ward (1848-1912) was the most celebrated taxidermist in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He built up a hugely successful business that operated from Piccadilly the most fashionable quarter of nineteenth century London. This business was so strongly based that it continued to operate long after Rowlands death; in fact it survived in London until the early 1970s. In his lifetime he made many influential innovations in the craft of taxidermy but in these he was simply carrying on and improving on a family tradition. His father Henry Ward (1812-1878) had travelled to America as a young man to serve as taxidermist to the illustrious bird artist John James Audubon (1785-1851) and prepared many of the specimens on which Audubon based the bird portraits for which he became so famous and which were central to his celebrated book The Birds of America (1827-1839). On his return home Henry Ward took over a taxidermy firm that operated in the West End of London and became a significant tradesman in his own right. Henrys oldest son Edwin and then Rowland were introduced into the business at an early age and Edwin soon became an important figure on the London zoological scene. Long before his fathers death he opened his own studio in Wigmore Street where he produced work of high quality. However comparatively little is known of him and he retired in 1879 for unknown reasons and soon after emigrated to the US. This left Rowland as the sole representative of the Ward family and he raised the family profile to heights that even his brother and father had not been able to reach. In addition to his attainments in taxidermy Rowland became an important publisher and was responsible for the production of many books on natural history and travel subjects. In this endeavour he was building on a tradition begun by his brother who had produced a book called A Knapsack Manual for Sportsmen in the Field (1872) that Rowland later expanded to become his own big success The Sportsmans Handbook to Practical Collecting a publication so influential that it ran to no less than eleven editions.