Leslie Ward 1851-1922, cartoonist, was born in Harewood Square, London, 21 November 1851, the eldest son of Edward Matthew Ward [q.v.], historical painter, by his wife, Henrietta Mary Ada Ward. The two families, although they had the same surname, were not related. Mrs. Ward (who died in 1924 at the age of ninety-two) was herself a painter; her father, George Raphael Ward [q.v.], was a mezzotint engraver and miniaturist; her grandfather, James Ward [q.v.], was an engraver and animal painter; and she was niece and great-niece respectively of John Jackson [q.v.], portrait-painter, and of George Morland [q.v.]. After preparatory instruction at Mr. Chase's school at Salt Hill, near Slough, Ward was sent to Eton. His home was visited by many famous artists; and both heredity and environment tended to foster in him precocious artistic development; he exhibited at the Royal Academy while still at school a bust of his brother and a painting (1867). After a brief period of architectural study under Sydney Smirke [q.v.], he joined the Royal Academy Schools in 1871. (Sir) John Everett Millais was much struck by his caricatures, and introduced him to Thomas Gibson Bowles [q.v.], the proprietor of Vanity Fair, who chanced to be in need of a new cartoonist.
From the year 1873 onwards Ward contributed regularly to Vanity Fair, under the pseudonym of 'Spy'; and for thirty-six years produced cartoons of large numbers of well-known people - politicians, hunting men, judges, jockeys, authors, musicians, bishops, generals - executed in colour and reproduced by lithography. These prints had a wide vogue, and were framed for the walls of innumerable clubs, common-rooms, restaurants, and other places of resort. Ward also did a certain amount of serious portraiture and some architectural drawings. In 1915 he wrote a book of recollections, Forty Years of 'Spy', a pleasant but feeble work. He was knighted in 1918. He died in London 15 May 1922.
Ward was a character-portraitist rather than a caricaturist in the strict sense of the word. He produced good likenesses of his subjects, dressed in their ordinary clothes; and neither presented them in dramatic or mythological guise nor used them to point a political or social moral. He was not a sensitive draughtsman, nor was he a decorator; and the Vanity Fair plates may best be described as very good pictorial journalism, largely dependent on topical appositeness for their appeal. His best work, in his own opinion, was done not from formal sittings, but when the model was unaware of the scrutiny.
Sources:
The Times, 16 May 1922; Sir L. Ward, Forty Years of 'Spy', 1915; Vanity Fair
albums, passim. Of National Biography; Oxford.