He moved to the British Museum in 1848 and became the preferred illustrator for explorers and naturalists including David Livingstone, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates.

[3] In his boyhood he assiduously studied bird and animal life, and showed a remarkable capacity as a draughtsman of natural history subjects.

He made himself brushes from the fur of a stone marten, and drew illustrations of birds that he raised from the nest or found near his home.

He took a special interest in birds of prey, and considered art as a career but realized at the age of sixteen that he needed more training to be professional.

[9] Kaup was impressed by his abilities and took one of Wolf's sketchbooks to a meeting in Leyden to show to Hermann Schlegel at the Natural History Museum, Leiden.

[10] The result was a set of "magnificent paintings of birds of prey in life size" which established Wolf's reputation in Europe.

As a fit young man with sharp-shooting abilities he could not be rejected, but it was peacetime and the surgeon, who knew him, helped him avoid recruitment under the pretext of a weak chest.

He was a keen observer of wild birds and once had a pit dug in which he sat all day to watch the courtship of black grouse.

[19] Wolf also noted that Gould lacked a knowledge of feather patterning, apart from knowing nothing about composition, with a tendency to add too much colour, claiming that specimens in the wild were brighter.

Wolf was commissioned by the Zoological Society of London to paint a watercolour of wapiti deer in the snow; it is dated January 1881.

[21]Wolf joined an association called the German Athenaeum which was founded in 1869 and members met for scientific, literary and musical evenings.

Wolf established wildlife art as a genre and his observation of living birds allowed him to produce illustrations in very accurate and lifelike stances.

[27] Wolf made numerous drawings in pen and charcoal as well as lithographs for scholarly societies such as the Zoological Society of London (he produced 340 "attractive" colour plates for the ZSL Proceedings in the course of 30 years),[11] and a very large number of illustrations for books on natural history and travel published from various countries;[4] and was considerably successful as a painter as well.