“Der Panterausbruch,” by Walton Ford.
Ford based his painting on a Panthera pardus that escaped from the Zurich Zoo in 1934. The animal survived for two months in the Swiss winter before being killed for food (!) by a “casual laborer.” An excerpt of Ford’s source is quoted in the back of the Taschen volume I wrote about here. The director of the Zurich Zoo noted that more than 800 articles were written about the animal by the Swiss press alone; and that people were reporting the animal everywhere, mistaking dog footprints for it, and urging that a clairvoyant and an exorcist be brought in to help find it/catch it. Also, the director said that the Zoo couldn’t have asked for better publicity…”the propaganda value of the escape was incalculable.”
I immediately thought of this painting when I heard about the wild animals let loose from a Zanesville, OH, compound variously described as a “wild animal farm,” a “preserve,” or, laughably, a “sanctuary.” The media — salivating like hungry dogs over such a thrilling bleeder-leader: “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” cliched the idiots at the Daily News — is still breaking, but I’ll go with the description “prison,” run by a weapons-stockpiling nut who’d already been charged with animal cruelty in 2005. After years of letting a horrible situation fester, law enforcement got to go on a big game safari: most of the approximately 50 animals thought to have gotten loose have been shot dead.
When I first saw Ford’s painting, I thought the scene was from a century earlier. Although it says 1934 right on it, I read it as 1834. Helping in this misreading were the torches of the people in the background. They reminded me of the townspeople chasing after Frankenstein’s Monster, the beast within ever projected outwards onto the monsters and the animals. And they reminded me of slave-hunters; and kidnappers after runaway slaves; and a crowd of fine Southern white folk setting out to a picnic-lynching, circa 1934, with fried chicken, potato salad, and cool, cool sweet tea.
A closer look at the pursuers and a deciphering of Ford’s hand-written comments at the bottom right reveals more detail. The townsfolk are not hunters at all. They’re pagans, for nothing sheds the prophylaxis of civilization and its handmaiden Christianity like irrational terror. Les gens/die Menschen/le persone are making a procession of loud and discordant noise, hoping to scare away the female (it figures) spirits of the wood, and with them the beast cat, who, naturally, must be their familiar…
My initial associations weren’t so far off after all. The painting’s alternate title could be: Timeless Variation on a Witch Hunt.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/In the darkness of the Zanesville night
Backyard and Beyond 
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