Rowland Ward

James Rowland Ward (1848–1912) was a British taxidermist and founder of the firm Rowland Ward Limited of Piccadilly, London. The company specialised in and was renowned for its taxidermy work on birds and big-game trophies, but it did other types of work as well. In creating many practical items from antlers, feathers, feet, skins, and tusks, the Rowland Ward company made fashionable items from animal parts, such as zebra-hoof inkwells, antler furniture, and elephant-feet umbrella stands.

Rowland Ward was also a well-known publisher of natural history books and big-game hunting narratives. The most famous and enduring Rowland Ward Ltd. product is the Records of Big Game series of books, which started in 1892 and is now in its twenty-ninth edition (2014). These books contain measurements of game animals from all over the world and is the oldest such series of books in existence.

Even before Rowland Ward's time, the Ward family had been involved in taxidermy and natural history. According to the history of the Rowland Ward company by P. A. Morris, Rowland Ward's grandfather was a naturalist and dealer in animal skins. Edwin Henry Ward (1812–1878), Rowland Ward's father, was a very well-known taxidermist in his day. Edwin H. Ward travelled with John James Audubon on his expeditions, and Ward collected and prepared the bird skins for the artist. These specimens were later used by Audubon in his epic The Birds of America.

Edwin H. Ward set up a taxidermy shop in London in 1857 and received a royal warrant from Queen Victoria in 1870. Other distantly related Ward family members had taxidermy-related businesses as far away as New York and Australia. Edwin H. Ward had two sons, Edwin Jr. and James Rowland. Both were trained in their father's business and were successful on their own, mounting heads for the British royal family as well the empress of Austria, among others. Edwin Jr. left the taxidermy business and eventually moved to the United States where he was involved in various ventures. Edwin Jr.'s son, Herbert Ward (1863–1919), served as a zoologist for Henry Morton Stanley during Stanley's 1887–1888 Emin Pasha Relief Expedition into the interior of then-unknown Africa.

Rowland Ward became the best-known taxidermist of the family. In his own book, A Naturalist's Life Study he said he left school at age fourteen to work in his father's shop. Rowland helped his father mount a hummingbird collection for John Gould. Early on, his focus was on sculpting and anatomically correct modelling. Rowland Ward was also a bronze sculptor of note.

...
Wikipedia