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Betty Davenport Ford: The Essence of an Animal

Betty Davenport Ford (1924–2020) never tired of animals. From childhood on, she watched them closely: how a goat sets its feet, how a boar lowers its head to run, how a dove gathers itself at rest. Where most of us see an animal, she saw a set of forms. For more than sixty years, in clay and bronze, she worked to capture the quality that made each creature itself and nothing else.

Her method began with study and ended in restraint. She learned anatomy thoroughly, then let most of it go. Rather than model every feather or strand of fur, she kept only what the form needed: the curve of a back, the angle of a head, the weight of a body settling into rest. There is affection in that restraint. Her animals are never stiff. They seem to have paused for a moment, ready to move again once we look away.

She built many of them by hand in stoneware and earthenware, incising lines into the clay and finishing the surfaces with glaze. Others she cast in bronze. She gave the space around each figure as much thought as the figure itself, knowing that a crouch reads as a crouch because of the air around it.

Her eye was sharpened by her training. Born in Upland, she studied with sculptor Albert Stewart at Scripps College in Claremont and earned her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She made Claremont her home, taught at Scripps and Pasadena City College, and carried her animals into public life with a large tiger for Chaffey High School in Ontario and fountains for the Pomona Mall, here in our own city.

Her husband, Harold, photographed every sculpture she made and later published a book of her work. Her sculpture has long been part of the Sasse Museum of Art’s permanent collection, and in this exhibition her menagerie is gathered in one place.

Betty Davenport Ford found the form beneath the fur and trusted it to speak.

Oct 30th - Nov 22nd 2026
Art-Talk: Nov 1st 2026
Reception: Sun Nov 15th 2-4pm