(Pluri)harmonic morphisms and the Penrose-Ward transform

We show that, in quaternionic geometry, the Ward transform is a manifestation of the functoriality of the basic correspondence between the $\rho$-quaternionic manifolds and their twistor spaces. We apply this fact, together with the Penrose transform, to obtain existence results for hypercomplex manifolds and for harmonic morphisms from hyper-Kaehler manifolds.