Although raised in a rural setting where opportunities to be introduced to the sculptural arts were rare, Ward showed an early interest in plastic expression and was encouraged to give it vent in the workshop of a local potter. At the age of nineteen, he went to Brooklyn, New York, where he was apprenticed to the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown. He remained in Brown's employ until 1856. The most important of Brown's projects on which Ward worked during these years was the equestrian statue of George Washington for Union Square, New York. Ward's first major independent work was The Indian Hunter, designed about 1857. Its showing in the Academy annual exhibition of 1862 probably contributed to Ward's election to Associate that spring.
Ward's career was soon assured. During the 1860s he executed portrait busts and several monumental works including The Seventh Regiment Memorial in New York's Central Park. The 1870s opened with a commission for a statue of Shakespeare, also in Central Park, and closed with the unveiling of the equestrian figure of Major General Thomas in Washington, D. C.
In the same period, Ward was becoming increasingly involved in the art organizations of New York, especially the National Academy. In 1865, he was hired by the Academy to supervise the repair of its plaster casts and busts and to make copies of the classical casts where appropriate. He was appointed a visitor to the Academy school for the 1867-68 season. In 1870 and 1871 he was elected vice-president of the Academy, and continued to serve on its Council the next year; in 1873 he was elected president, the first sculptor to hold the post. His generosity to the Academy was manifest on several occasions. Besides making several monetary donations over the years, he acquired plaster casts for the use of Academy students on his trips to Europe in 1872 and 1887; in the latter year, Academy minutes records his gift of ten plasters. In 1909, his donation of seventeen small bronze figures of nudes used for anatomical study was noted.
By the late 1870s, Ward's artistic talents were in great demand and he was usually the first choice for the execution of monumental sculpture. Among his most well-known works of the 1880s and 1890s are the statue of George Washington for Federal Hall, New York; the James Garfield Memorial, the Mall, Washington; Horace Greeley, City Hall Park, New York; and Henry Ward Beecher, Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn. Ward had by now fully earned the title "Dean of American Sculptors" and, as Lewis Sharp has pointed out, his productivity continued unabated almost until his death.
