Born in London, James Ward, along with his brother William (1766–1826), was apprenticed to the engraver John Raphael Smith (1752–1812) for about two years and became a skilled and productive mezzotinter. In 1794 he was appointed painter and engraver in mezzotint to the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, who in the 1820s commissioned a series of fourteen lithographs of celebrated horses and three equestrian paintings.¹ When Ward began to paint in the 1790s, his subject matter and painting style were largely indebted to the rustic genre scenes of his brother-in-law, George Morland, and the richly colored Baroque compositions of the seventeenth-century master Peter Paul Rubens.² In 1800 he joined the Sketching Society, an informal gathering of young artists in Dr. Thomas Monro’s circle, founded by the leadership of Thomas Girtin the previous year and aimed at establishing a “School of Historic Landscape.”³ Ward also sketched constantly from nature and made anatomical and animal studies. Since engravers were not eligible for the Royal Academy of Arts, he abandoned his lucrative career as a reproductive engraver to focus on painting. Ward exhibited often at the British Institution. He also showed almost three hundred works at the Royal Academy, becoming a full member by 1811. His accolades are for being one of the great animal painters of his time, yet he commented in 1822 that he despised the “Farmyard Taste” of British patrons.⁴ In the 1810s and 1820s, Ward also began painting landscapes with brooding overtones that followed the aesthetic of the sublime. In 1830 he retired to Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, where he lived to an old age.⁵

Ward’s landscape compositions in pure watercolor are rare and are generally sweeping views of nature with dramatically lit skies, influenced by Romanticism. He visited Pegwell Bay, a shallow inlet in the English Channel at the estuary of the River Stour between Ramsgate and Sandwich, on the east Kent coast, several times during his lifetime. This intimate watercolor highlights the grandeur of the cliffs of Pegwell Bay with vibrant linework, a moderate angle of perspective, and translucent washes that convey atmospheric qualities, no doubt influenced by Thomas Girtin and his restrained palette and fluid handling of the materials.⁶

Several drawings by Ward are of this place, including a drawing in pencil in which he sketched houses on the cliff edge on the front of the sheet and on its verso another sketch of the bay with the clifftop fenced in. He made a painting of the same subject, dated November 16, 1816, and inscribed “as it was about twenty years past.”⁷ This watercolor most closely relates to an oil sketch made from the same vantage point, but the coloristic treatment appears to be from late in the day, unlike the clear appearance seen here (fig. 25.1).⁸ Both watercolor and oil sketch of similar proportions focus on the beauty of the cliffs and are devoid of the fishing, shrimping, and leisure activities of the area. Some forty years later, William Dyce portrayed a calm Pegwell Bay in the evening from a similar viewpoint when the resort area was booming (fig. 25.2).⁹ —Dena M. Woodall