Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

The Tale of Johnny Nutkin

Image not available
Walton Ford
1960-

The Tale of Johnny Nutkin

2001
Sheet: 44 x 31 in. (111.8 x 78.7 cm); plate: 36 x 24 in. (91.4 x 61 cm)
Etching and aquatint with drypoint.
2022.360

Gift of Judith Goldman.

Notes
Walton Ford established his reputation in the 1990s with his monumental watercolor paintings of wild animals inspired by true or legendary stories of dramatic encounters between man and nature. Early on, his admiration for John James Audubon led him to create many images of birds. This print is based on Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903) in which Nutkin taunts an old owl, who ends up biting his tail. Ford's depiction, in which a group of angry squirrels attack the owl turns the story into a metaphor for contemporary Great Britain politics, alluding to the reforms brought by Tony Blair's New Labour government in 2000 toward a more egalitarian society.
Printed on white Somerset Satin paper by Peter Pentingill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire.
Published by Blue Heron Press Inc., New York.
Inscriptions/Markings
Signed, dated, and numbered in an edition of 50, TP 3/15.
Artist
Classification
Century Drawings