If you have only seen Walton Ford’s animalia confined to the pages of a magazine, prepare to be amazed. The exhibit “Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford,” which opens tomorrow at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, is the artist’s first museum exhibition. It assembles more than 50 of Mr. Ford’s watercolors, mostly owned by private collectors, and gives them the monumentalizing wall space they so richly deserve.

The realistically rendered animals are magnificent. Whether massed together or given the gravitas treatment of portraiture, each painting offers an abundance of content, detail, and iconography. Mr. Ford’s virtuosic drawing technique and sensual coloring heighten the visual experience. Penciled texts added to the paintings serve as valuable interlocutors of the artist’s thematic interests. Even the weightiness of the paper, steeped in a brown wash to lend the image a faked authenticity, contributes to the works’ substantial character. But it is the grand scale of these watercolors — from the life-size Indochine tiger depicted in “Thanh Hoang” to the elephantinesize elephant in “Nila” — that accentuate each image’s historical scope and narrative impact. Interestingly, scale also minimizes the cruder aspects of the ever-present element of satire.

Mr. Ford’s paintings are meant to operate like scientific illustrations. In “Thanh Hoang,” one of Mr. Ford’s earliest works, a gorgeous tiger with an extended body reaches to the very edges of the paper. The flattened appearance invokes the aesthetics of 19-century naturalist art and maximizes the informational value of the image. Upon close inspection, though, shadow puppet figures emerge from the tiger’s inky black stripes; a man brandishing a sword and a woman raising her arms in lament.

Endangerment and extinction are major themes of Mr. Ford’s work. “Funk Island” is apocalyptic and cryptic. Giant auks, which once dominated this remote Newfoundland island, march across the painting descending, ultimately, into a fiery hellhole. As a contextual clue, Mr. Ford quotes a passage from an explorer’s diary detailing how his expedition burned the penguins for fuel. The single entry speaks to the penguins’ larger history and ultimate extinction.

Among the birds in Mr. Ford’s painting, a single auk stares at the spectator without any sense of apprehension. One doesn’t have to be a PETA sympathizer to appreciate this poor bird’s suffering or mourn its loss. This is Mr. Ford’s particular genius. He takes a global catastrophe, like the elimination of a species, and with his inventive deployment of allegorical rendering, historical evidence, and literary source material, immerses the spectator in the incidences of exploitation that lead to annihilation.

Sometimes the artist’s references to human destructiveness can be didactic. In “Bula Matari,” a hapless okapi (a zebra-striped member of the giraffe family found in Zaire) delicately licks at the lure of honeycomb on a stick, unaware that the strings entangling his feet will fire off both a camera and a gun. The point is hardly lost, but a tagged dead bird in the corner emphasizes the exploitative underpinnings of natural history research and, perhaps, man’s determination to remain at the top of the food chain.

The so-called lower members of the natural order, however, aren’t totally exempt from Mr. Ford’s critical gaze.

Within many of the works, creatures gorge, fornicate, fight, and usurp one another. In short, they behave a lot like their human predators. And, they are all devastatingly beautiful. A particularly chilling image of a falcon impassively squashing a woodpecker in his claws is one memorable example of Mr. Ford’s aesthetic of shock and awe. The image is located within “The Starling” (2002), in which the greatest ornithological villain the world has ever known is depicted in gargantuan dimensions. The starling is the stand-in for Western man and his rapacious ways. Paradoxically, even the famous men Mr. Ford satirizes, such as in “Dirty Dick Burton’s Aide de Camp,” still retain their superstar status within his work. The paintings emphasize the explorers’ audacity and almost surreal existences in what were then remote and dangerous areas of the world.

The works on display represent more than 10 years of Mr. Ford’s efforts to realize his interpretation of the continual clash between the natural world and civilization, indigenous environments and ambitious interlopers. Until recently, his geographical focus has largely centered on Africa and southeast Asia. More recently, though, his attention has been local and rooted in his own family history. Mr. Ford traces his ancestry back to the Civil War. In “November 1864,” a large, bristly warthog squats next to glistening reddish-green poison ivy creeping up a tree trunk. Delicate brush strokes transformed into armed soldiers and a wall of fire on the horizon convey the artist’s concerns with his own family legacy of destruction and ruin. Except for the title, there is no text, as if Mr. Ford finally feels his images can adequately speak for themselves.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art, which likes to single out emerging artists and give them their first taste of museum success, chose this artist because his work is accessible, poetic, and layered with meaning. Mr. Ford has stated that his future ambitions are “epochal” and may very well involve oil paint. But is there a canvas large enough to contain Mr. Ford’s visions?