James Ward painted portraits of two horses that belonged, respectively, to Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington: Marengo and Copenhagen, commissions that neatly capture both Ward's reputation as the leading animal portraitist of his generation and his ability to work equally for patrons on either side of the same conflict. Born in London in 1769, the younger brother of the engraver William Ward, James trained initially as an engraver himself before his brother-in-law, the painter George Morland, introduced him to oil painting; Ward's early work through the 1790s followed closely in Morland's anecdotal genre manner before a decisive shift, around 1803, towards the richer colouring and dramatic ambition of Rubens.
A prestigious commission from the Board of Agriculture for two hundred oil portraits of British livestock breeds established Ward's reputation as an animal painter of unusual accuracy and range, and from 1805 he became regularly employed painting pedigree horses, work that culminated in the lithographed series Celebrated Horses, published between 1823 and 1834. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1807 and a full Academician in 1811, Ward increasingly turned to landscape from around 1810, and his largest and most ambitious achievement in the genre, Gordale Scar, painted for the Yorkshire landowner Lord Ribblesdale between 1812 and 1815, remains one of the defining images of the English Sublime: a vast canvas, over thirteen feet wide, combining topographical accuracy with deliberately exaggerated scale, and populated with cattle, deer and a prize bull that Ward, despite his frequent claims to painting strictly from nature, in fact arranged in a composition that never actually existed. The painting drew admiration from the French Romantic painters Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault, an unusual cross-Channel tribute for an English animal and landscape specialist. Ward's later years brought financial difficulty following an expensive and poorly received attempt at a giant allegorical painting of Waterloo, and he retired to Hertfordshire in 1830, disillusioned with the art world, dying there in 1859.
The painting by Ward held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, The Farmyard, reflects the animal subject matter on which his reputation was founded before landscape and the pursuit of the Sublime came to dominate the second half of his long and, in his own lifetime, genuinely celebrated career.