The engraving by William Ward depicts the characters of the Old Testament. One day, David was walking on the roof of his palace. He looked down and saw the bathing Bathsheba, the wife of the brave warrior Uriah the Hittite, who was at this time far away, fighting at the war with the Ammonites. The king looked and the woman and coveted her. The king ordered the servants to bring the woman to him, committed the sin, and then sent her home. When Bathsheba became pregnant, David tried to hide the adultery. He summoned Uriah from the war, judging that the husband, who had not seen his wife for a long time, would wish to lie down with her, and the sin would go unnoticed. But Uriah refused to enter the house: ‘The Ark of the Lord and Israel and Judas are in tents, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are in the field, so would I enter my house and eat, and drink, and sleep with my wife!? By your life and by the life of your soul, I shall not do this.’
David sent the warrior back, with a letter to Commander Joab, in which he ordered: ‘Put Uriah in the place of the fiercest battle and step back from him, so that he will be slain and die’. Uriah was killed, and David took Bathsheba as his wife. A few months later, she gave birth to a son, Solomon.

The exact date of creation of the sheet is not known. William Ward created the engraving ‘David, Joab and Uriah’ based on the original painting by the Dutchman Ferdinand Bohl, in the mezzotint technique, or so called black style. With a special rocking tool, the artist made indentations in a metal board. In this way, he altered the texture of the surface, so that a black tone would lie on it better. The rocking tool passed each section of the board 20 or 30 times in different directions. Then, the artist literally scraped out the bright spots on the engraving with a scraper or a ‘sleeker.’ Smoother areas did not hold ink, so the master achieved tonal effects on his engraving. The movement of the scraper ‘from shadow to light’ imitated brushwork of the original painting, created a feeling of brush strokes, and the viewer perceived the engraving as a whole painting canvas.
In addition to mezzotint, William Ward worked in the technique of etching, aquatint, sometimes in a dotted style. In total, he created about 300 sheets. Most often, he created engravings based on the originals by his brother James Ward, artists John Raphael Smith, George Moreland, and Thomas Lawrence. In 1804, Ward became the engraver of the Duke of York, and in 1814 he was accepted to the Academy of Arts.