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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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Say what you will about the Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard collection at the Morgan Library: the collectors have taste.

No doubt they must if they are to go about their self-appointed task, but they have good taste in museums, too. They had the taste to contribute to the Frick Collection, which displayed their gift just last year. Now they continue as donors to another of New York’s most treasured enclaves. The gift brings just over two dozen drawings to the Morgan, from the Baroque through early Modernism, through October 6, just in time for the Moore gift to the Morgan (and my apologies if you just missed it)—and I bring my reports of both together as a longer review and my latest upload. If it is a touch tasteful, you will understand. Just do not mistake a welcome plainness and discipline for good taste.

Those who caught the Eveillard gift at the Frick will know it all but exclusively for decorative art. That suited an institution in its temporary quarters on Madison Avenue, with separate rooms for decorative art. What, then, should one expect for J. P. Morgan’s domain as himself a collector? Would the drawings run once more to excess or rather to another side of the decorative arts—academicism in place of experiment. In the end, sobriety wins out, and it need not be all that tasteful. It illuminates how much study goes into seemingly wilder art.

Peter Paul Rubens brings his usual sweeping gestures and creative excess to a biblical scene, with alternative compositions that collide on a single sheet on their way into the sky. Something of his musculature and movement appears as well in John the Baptist by a lesser artist, Tanzio da Varallo, around 1620. What, then, should one make of a seated woman in a sober dress by Juan Gris, without a trace of Cubist fragmentation? Tired of the repetition and contortions in sculpture by Auguste Rodin? Here a female nude lies asleep. The composition follows that of a standing nude regardless, with her head above her feet, and a second pair of legs show the artist finding his way and bringing her awake.

Artists, then, had work to do on their way to paintings and prints. Some never get all that far, and the show has its share of minor names and failures. Rembrandt focuses on an emotionally and morally laden moment, Judas returning the thirty pieces of silver, but it is less than memorable. Others, though, revel in restraint. Antoine Watteau often does, while inventing Rococo lightness, but what of Romanticism and Théodore Géricault? Soon after The Raft of the Medusa, with its the heroics on the verge of death, he sketched ordinary workers unloading a cart.

As with Géricault, plain and simple may be in service of sympathy with those that art might easily have left out. Paul Signac poses his grandfather, mother, and maid for The Dining Rome. Eugène Delacroix tones down the action for his caretaker, Guercino for a Moor. Paul Gauguin abandons his mythic women for a Tahitian child. Jean-Baptiste Greuze dispenses for once with his moralism for a cook reading. The engraver who received the drawing called her a thief, but she looks absorbed in her work and her imagination.

More often still, the artists worked from studies because that is what they do. John Constable takes care for layers of landscape, but Pierre-Auguste Renoir in watercolor can linger on a handful of clouds or trees, too. Jacob Jordaens in the Baroque and Georges Seurat in Post-Impressionism alike show standing figures from behind, in full weight. Those who know his drawings will know how much his art depends on the discipline of Conte crayon in black and white. For Edgar Degas, every painting is akin to a study, here with wild horses rather than dancers. For Paul Cézanne, the interplay of experiment and experience is the essence of art.

There have been better drawings and more ambitious exhibitions. The Eveillard gift to the Frick already had me thinking of how much finer it will look integrated into the Frick mansion as context for art. Still, it gets at space between experiment and experience. A dreamer by Odilon Redon from 1898 surrenders herself to her dream, but she seems so still, and she could be looking inward or observing the sky. A swash of white could be an emblem of surrender, a bird, or a cloud. She is of a piece with the readers and observers in work to every side.

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It was Christmas in July at the Morgan Library. No sooner did the small lobby gallery open with the Eveillard gift of drawings from several restless centuries than Santa was back in town. Eighty drawings from the Clement C. Moore collection are a promised gift—but more on him and Santa in a moment.

It offers a chance to assess just what the great age of Dutch art meant for the Dutch. It may not be a compendium of stellar names and stellar prints, but that seems only right for an emerging nation. It suggests a collective enterprise tied up in the Dutch republic while reaching across Europe with its influence, at the Morgan through September 22.

Moore, I can only presume, descends from Clement Clarke Moore, although the Morgan does not say so. It must wish him to stand on his own as a scholar and now donor. The older Moore, of course, wrote “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” about “the night before Christmas,” and that seems right, too. No one did more to convert a religious holiday to a secular one—and a gift to all mankind to a bag of toys for children. (Trust me, a Jew who benefited.) And no nation did more to assert a secular purpose for art.

It stays all the truer to that purpose in drawings. In The Hundred Guilder Print (nicknamed for its one-timer cost and extravagance), Rembrandt shows Jesus preaching, healing the sick, and reaching out to all. A quick sketch isolates a sick woman and a still more haunting face. The poor really will always be with us. A boy from Adriaen van de Velde, who could easily be their companion, catches what rest he can leaning on the jug that must have helped put him to sleep and given him what small pleasures he could claim. The angel of the Annunciation for Samuel van Hoogstraten seems to have dropped by just to say hello.

The show opens with Mannerism in the late 1500s, to show the emergence of a new art and a new century, although dates jump wildly back and forth. It has an alcove for what a past show at the Morgan (also with work from Moore) called “Rembrandt’s World,” but with more of his school than the man itself. It cares more for results than for chronology or artist, in an arrangement largely by subject. That includes France and Italy, where Cornelis van Poelenburch found inspiration for Dutch landscape in towering, glistening rocks. It includes close observation of butterflies and tulips, with none of the moralizing in still life as fresh but dying for Flemish artists of the time. It includes the Flemish themselves, like Jacob Jordaens, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck.

Mostly, though, it describes a land and people. It unfolds during their long war of independence from Spain, but without a battle in sight. The royal fleet puts on a show in panorama, but not half so memorably as fishermen for Hendrick Avercamp, a lone man crossing a bridge for Guercino (an Italian), or the banks of a stream for Jacob van Ruisdael. A Roman general comes home to a public welcome, but it could be just another village festival. And gatherings are everywhere, only not so easy to tell from chance encounters and private outings. Hendrick Goltzius fills a sheet with nudes, as prelude to painted myth. They might have gathered for an afternoon in the sun.

Individuals come off as smart, casual, and vulnerable, with not a touch of Flemish bravura. A man from Peter Levy, quite possibly himself, might be dreaming or showing off. He also shares his dignity with herdsmen for Paulus Potter and Jan Lievens, who also supply the herd. The nation was built on their collective labor. It was built, too, on wind power, but windmills are just one landmark in a layered landscape. Aelbert Cuyp uses lighter strokes in chalk to deepen and distinguish the layers.

You can, if you like, tease out how he and others constructed a world. Esaias van de Velde replaces the aerial perspective of Harvesters for Pieter Bruegel with a close view. Moore has continued to collect past the Baroque, too, and a postscript carries him through Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner with their greater confidence and drama. Then again, you can stick with the spirit of a plainer art. When Vincent van der Vinne sketches the Grote Kerk in Haarlem, he leaves family emblems on pillars at peculiar angles. The might show a lesser artist at work, human neglect, or the ravages of war.

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Was Peter Rabbit an environmentalist? Maybe not, but his creator was. Beatrix Potter fought for England’s Lake District as a natural reserve, and she willed her considerable holdings to the National Trust to make it so. To ask the Morgan Library, she had a love of nature since childhood, and it informs the naturalism of her friendly creatures and her art.

An exhibition gets both main galleries, a rarity, through June 9, to recreate what she saw and the home she knew. This is not, the Morgan insists, just for kids. Call it child’s play, if you wish, or call it art, with loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum. At the very least, as the show’s title has it, it is “Drawn to Nature.” Potter would have appreciated the gentleness of the pun. Soon after in America, Wanda Gág brings a greater darkness to both children and nature—and I work this together with reports to come on Gág and Walton Ford, another admirer of animals, as a longer review and my latest upload.

As for Peter’s politics, I am not so sure. He does, after all, raid his neighbor’s garden to gobble up as much of it as he can, like a corporate farmer today. Or was he just a rabbit, reclaiming his habitat from human incursion, like a proper environmentalist? Standards back then were different, and Potter, with her brother, collected everything in sight. (They dissected dead animals as well.) She learned from zoos and science museums, counting everything, however humble, as fellow beings and friends.

Potter drew insects and made a particular study of wild mushrooms in watercolor. She could never match the crisp sublimity of John Constable, although she admired him, and an 1850 still life by William Henry Hunt, of a bird’s nest and blossom, stands out from hers for its intricacy and color. Still, her mushrooms seem almost to tremble, and that, too, suggests her closeness to what she observed. Her landscapes stop short of Constable’s clouds, in favor of the land before her eyes. When she does cut loose, it is for the middle distance, a place to which she could belong. She reserves her most startling color and perspective for a valley or a garden path.

Her brush leaves its mark back and forth in gray, for ripples beneath a boat on otherwise placid waters. This is nature, but inhabited by insects, animals, and humans alike. It is also, sure enough, a lake. Potter might seem an unlikely naturalist. Born in 1866, she grew up in and around London, but she relished vacations in Scotland and summers in the Lake District, to which she dreamed of returning for good. She got her wish at last with a late marriage and increasing income from children’s books and their merchandising, which she took the lead in developing.

She called the property Hill Top Farm, which itself sounds like a children’s book, but this was hilly country in fiction and in fact. She also took farming seriously, like everything else. She managed flocks of sheep personally, just as she insisted on miniature or folding books and designed her own end papers. The family made its money from the textile business, which may have influenced her close care in such things as bedspreads and wallpaper. The Morgan places related photos and sketches within quaint walls to convey their intimacy. She grew up with Wedgewood pottery as well.

She was always a proper Victorian, from a childhood that John Singer Sargent might have painted to her death in 1943. That includes her faith in science, which her family encouraged with the gift of a pocket microscope. An uncle, a chemist, introduced her to a Bunsen burner. It also includes the moral basis of her stories. Engaging as he is, Peter never makes it home from his trespasses without losing his clothes or gaining a whipping. They were nice clothes at that, down to a gentleman’s blue coat and shoes.

Still, Potter took comfort in his human impulses and gave comfort as well. The first of her books came out in 1902, but it had its origins in a “picture letter” nineteen years earlier to a sick child. There is no getting around, too, a serious case of the cutes, but such was her calling. From the moment her brush turns to warm-blooded animals, the faces get shyer and more endearing, even as they acquire more closely observed fur. But then, to her credit, Peter grows older over the course of the books, and one can excuse him and his cousin, Benjamin Bunny, for their place between species. When they head off to scavenge for goodies, they, too, are drawn to nature.

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