Background
Henry Wolf was born on August 3, 1852, in Eckwersheim, France. He was a son of Simon Wolf and Pauline (Ettinger) Wolf.
Henry Wolf was born on August 3, 1852, in Eckwersheim, France. He was a son of Simon Wolf and Pauline (Ettinger) Wolf.
At the age of fifteen, Henry left home and obtained employment in a machine shop in Strasbourg. There, a wood engraver, Jacques Lévy, encouraged his artistic efforts and later took him into his shop.
In November 1871, Wolf arrived in the United States and almost immediately found work in Albany. Two years later, he went to New York City, where he remained until the end of his life.
It was in 1873, that Henry joined the evening art school of the Cooper Union and worked in the life class for two years. At the same time, he worked with wood engraving in the Harper Brothers' art department under Frederick Juengling. In a notebook, neatly and accurately kept, Wolf recorded all the blocks he cut (789) between 1877 and the year of his death. The earliest of these were for Scribner's Monthly and St. Nicholas.
At first and for some years, young Wolf from time to time produced blocks for other engravers, notably Smithwick and French, as well as Juengling. Among these were illustrations for Appleton's school readers. But it also happily fell to his lot to engrave the works of some of the leading illustrators of the day, such as Howard Pyle, Edwin A. Abbey, Joseph Pennell, A. B. Frost, Mary Hallock Foote, Reginald Birch, and others.
A commission, received in 1879, to engrave the illustrations for William Mackay Laffan's articles on the Tile Club, for Scribner's, brought Henry into close association with some of the foremost painters, and the following year, in 1880, he engraved his first reproductions of paintings - works by Walter Shirlaw, George Inness, John Singer Sargent, and others - illustrations for William C. Brownell's "The Younger Painters of America" (Scribner's Monthly, May, July 1880). Similar commissions followed, and Wolf's skill increased until he became preeminent in the reproduction of paintings by contemporary American artists through the medium of wood engraving.
Before half-tone photo-engraving came into use about 1880, wood engraving was chiefly a black line process, but through this invention the white line became supreme, and the rendition of tones and textures possible. Wolf was quick to master the new medium and to realize its adaptability. Only one other - Timothy Cole - ever carried it to such perfection as he, and thereby Wolf made a unique and distinguished contribution to the art of the world.
It was in 1882, that Henry began making book illustrations, engraving blocks for J. B. Lippincott and other publishers. In a portfolio, issued by the Society of American Wood Engravers in 1887, he was represented by cuts of a landscape, painted by Robert S. Gifford and "New England Peddler" by Jonathan Eastman Johnson.
A decade later, Wolf made, by way of experiment, a number of original blocks - landscapes of subtle and sensitive character, but without significant merit. About this time, he also began publishing some of his blocks himself, issuing them in limited editions as collectors' items. This led to orders for blocks from collectors. George A. Hearn, William T. Evans, Richard Canfield, Charles L. Freer and others commissioned him to engrave for them portraits of themselves by distinguished painters or other canvases in their collections.
Among the blocks, that Henry published privately, are Whistler's portraits of his mother and of Thomas Carlyle, which are by some considered his masterpieces. Of equal merit, however, is the engraving of his own portrait, painted by Irving R. Wiles, published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in January 1906.
Beginning in 1896, Henry published original works of his own design with Evening Star. For the Century Magazine, beginning in April 1898, Wolf engraved a series of portraits of women, painted by Gilbert Stuart.
Later, in 1908, Wolf was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design.
It's also worth noting, that, during his lifetime, Henry exhibited throughout Europe, Paris in particular. In 1915, he exhibited 144 wood engravings at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where he received the Grand Prize in Printmaking.
Lumbermen's Camp
Portrait of a Lady
A Sermon in the Open Air
Mrs. De Crespigny
The Bird That Lives in Water-Falls
Young Michelangelo
The Goldfish
Japanese Girl (The Musmee)
Joachim Murat King of Naples
Statue of Oya Jizo
Killing the Moose
Henry Mills Alden
Easter Cover
Napoleon before the Sphinx
The Mother
Henry Irving at Home
Tiger
Summer
At Kissingen
Joseph Jefferson as "Dr. Pangloss"
A Religious Procession in Brittany
May Be "Shipwrecked
Berry Pickers' Camp
Canal in Artois
Miss Frances Cadwalader (Lady Erskine)
Boy with the Torn Hat
In 1908, Henry was made a full member of the National Academy of Design. He was also a member of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, London, and the Union Internationale des Beaux Arts et des Lettres, Paris.
Wolf had an exceedingly courteous, genial manner and his life throughout was uncommonly successful and happy.
Physical Characteristics: Throughout his life, Wolf enjoyed robust health. His chief recreation was walking.
Henry married Rose (Massée) Wolf, a daughter of Hermann Massée, a merchant from Hamburg, Germany, on September 25, 1875. Their marriage produced two sons, one of whom became an artist.