Some might weep for men thrown to the lions. Walton Ford thinks first of the lions. His works on paper delight in their pleasure, at the Morgan Library through October 20. Is this nature in captivity or set free?

After two thousand years, the cruelty of ancient Rome still inspires sadness and terror, but Ford is not cowering or crying. Nor will he waste his art on prisoners and gladiators sent to their fate. He pictures instead creatures raised in captivity to face a violent, unnatural death. What should they care about blood, bread, and circuses? What good does it do them if a lion roars at the start of an MGM movie? William Butler Yeats wrote of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” but not even that might help.

Ford imagines them in the wild, if only for a moment and far from their native habitat. Does he himself exploit nature’s resources to his own ends? What if the whole idea of a savage beast is a human fiction? Yet that is precisely his theme, and it takes him not to Africa and Asia, but to the zoo and to countless hours in the American Museum of Natural History with its preserved beasts and created habitats. There, he points out, they have nowhere to hide. His watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink will not become children’s books as for Beatrix Potter or Wanda Gág, but it tells a story all the same.

He is drawn to real-life narratives from the past, like the Barbary lions in Rome. They are stories of escape, recapture, and death, although his work skips over the ending, because he cannot stop for death. A black panther escaped Zurich’s zoo in 1933, surviving ten days in the alpine snow before a farmer cooked and ate him. A trolley crashed into a circus caravan in 1913, setting lions free from their cage, and do not ask what happened to them. Oh, and MGM kept a real Barbary lion as a mascot. Ford titles it after the studio’s motto, Ars Gratia Artis, but this is not just an act, and it refuses to roar.

He can work large, on the scale of a mural, and he calls it painting. One work not on display runs across several sheets and thirty feet. More often, he works small and fast. The show celebrates his gift of sixty-three studies—all tied up in his favored narratives. They climax with single set pieces, on loan, of the lion and panther. He is thinking what could have happened to the animal on the loose, not perfecting a portrait or a story.

The panther prowls the snow with the still-quaint village behind him in the dusk, thinking perhaps of home in India. He sets upon a goat, and who knows? It might have happened. He had to eat something in ten days. He leaps upon the bare branch of a tree bending away from its narrow trunk, but never coming into flower. Blood might have dripped on the ground and colored the sky, unless its red is merely his shadow in the snow and sunset in the clouds.

Vistas may open up all to one side of the snowy hills, but the action is all in the foreground, right before one’s eyes. Ford is not above observation, as of a lion’s whiskers. Yet creatures take on almost human personalities, for the viewer to put in words. The large portraits are sedentary by comparison but no less human and no less concerned with artifice. The MGM motto means art for art’s sake, as if Hollywood ever thought that way, but it could well be speaking of him. The show’s subtitle speaks of “Birds and Beasts of the Studio,” and the studio is surely the artist’s.

Born in 1960, he found his subject in the 1990s, but the work is mostly recent. The curators, Isabelle Dervaux and Christina M. Pae, also give him access to the Morgan’s collection, and his selections speak of him, too. They run to observers like John James Audubon and Edwin Henry Landseer, but also such literary types as Potter and Edward Lear. Audubon has squirrels climbing a tree much like the panther, and Indian art has an elephant turning on its trainer. Could Rembrandt, as Ford thinks, have prepared his etching in the open air, the better to observe? I cannot swear that Ford respects animals half as much as his imagination, but they are still ready to pounce.

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