John Ward was a self-taught artist,the son of a Master Mariner, who began his career apprenticed to a house and ship painter in Hull. Having completed his term by 1819, aged 21, he exhibited his first painting at the Royal Academy twleve years later. By the early 1840's, he had begun to explore printmaking to produce ship portraits of local vessels and to gather material for a Manual of Marine Painting. "Marine Studies of British Merchant Vessels" and "Ten Views Illustrative of the Several Rates and Classes of Vessels in Her Majesty's Navy" appeared as albums of lithographs bound in paper covers. They were; "expressly executed as a work of information and instruction ... forming a Guide to Drawing for the purpose of Painting and Marine Profession generally."
John Ward did not live to complete his project. He died of cholera in Hull during the great epidemic of 1849. This book brings together Ward's works on paper for the first time in order to realise his original aim