LION'S DEN

In Manhattan's West Village, painter Walton Ford lovingly touches up a historic town house and reveals his true colors

- SARAH MEDFORD

Walton Ford's town house, in the meandering heart of Greenwich Village, is the one with the lion's-head knocker on its front door. Of course it is: For decades now the artist has made a subject of animals, the more ferocious-looking the better, the ones people go on safari to ogle through binoculars. As depicted by Ford, these beasts are so close you can count the hairs on their knuckles. In his recent show at The Morgan Library & Museum, a monumental watercolor portrays a salivating male lion lounging by a swimming pool in the moonlight.

There's a story behind the painting, needless to say, and another behind Ford's stout little house. The two-bedroom residence was built in the Federal style in 1830, a time when New York City was carving itself block by block out of a rural landscape. "You can feel the hand of the creator and the ingenuity here," Ford says. "I see things in an old house that make me fall in love with the person who built it."

The artist was living above a noisy tequila bar a few blocks away when his studio manager shared a real estate listing for the place in 2016. He dismissed it as unaffordable, but after the price dropped two years later, he pounced. A technically adroit painter in the mode of Dürer or Audubon, Ford subverts his traditional subject matter to expose uncomfortable truths about humans and our bad behavior toward the natural world. Inside his diminutive brick house, the traditional subject matter had been subverted long before he arrived. "It was all suburbanized," he says, sounding wounded as he recalls the blandly up-to-date interior.