Wolf, Joseph

Joseph Wolf was a German artist who specialised in natural history illustration. Wolf travelled to London in 1848 and was introduced by David William Mitchell, an amateur illustrator and Secretary of the Zoological Society of London. He 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. Wolf was commissioned by the Zoological Society of London to paint a watercolour of wapiti deer in the snow; it is dated 1881. When Charles Darwin began his study of animal expressions, he was introduced by Abraham Dee Bartlett, London Zoo Superintendent, to the abilities of Wolf in illustrating minute details of animals in action. Darwin requested Wolf to make some illustrations from photographs and living animals in the zoological garden. Wolf made numerous drawings in pen and charcoal as well as lithographs for scholarly societies such as the Zoological Society of London (he produced 340 colour plates for the ZSL Proceedings in the course of 30 years), and a very large number of illustrations for books on natural history. Until 1946, the cover of the journal Ibis carried a woodcut by Wolf of an ibis against a background with ruins, a pyramid and a rising sun.