Artists in the Spotlight: Leslie Matthew Ward

Leslie Matthew Ward was born on November 21, 1851 in London, where he died on May 15, 1922. He is regarded as a renowned portrait painter and caricaturist, who made portraits and caricatures in a typical watercolor painting, which he published mainly under the pseudonyms "Spy" and "Drawl" in the British weekly magazine "Vanaty Fair". There, his so-called "spy portraits" were converted into chromolithographies, which were reproduced on a better paper and sold separately as prints. Ward's influence on the genre was extraordinary. He had started with portraits whose caricatural elements were pronounced: he distorted the physical proportions of his models by his head and upper body represented much larger. Examples include the portrait of Edward Bickersteth, Dean of Lichfield (1884) and the Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (1904). Later, his style developed into so-called "characteristic portraits," which were less caricatures than actual portraits with realistic proportions - such as the portraits of Admiral Sir Compton Edward Domvile (1906) or the Nobel laureate of chemistry Sir William Ramsay (1908). Leslie Ward's parents Henrietta and Edward Ward were well-known history painters with studios in Borough of Slough and Kensington London. While still a student at Eton College, Ward made caricatures of his teachers and classmates. Artistic studies followed at the Royal Academy Schools - then the publications began in the "Vanaty Fair". His portraits of ladies and gentlemen of society were always sympathetic; he made them mostly from memory, after watching his "victims" on the racetrack, in the church, in the courts, in the university lecture hall or in the lobby of the Houses of Parliament. Ward published 1 325 portraits on "Vanety Fair" - his life's work included 2,387 published cartoons. In 1918 he was knighted. Sir Leslie Matthew Ward was married and had a daughter.

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