A Hare in the Forest

Nibbling on a leaf pulled from a stalk of Lady’s Mantle, an alert hare sits at the edge of a pine forest, each plant and insect around it — snail, cricket, beetle, thistle, plantain, hare bell — rendered in vivid, theatrical detail. Hans Hoffmann, who had seen Albrecht Dürer’s famous watercolour of a hare while in Nuremberg and later helped Emperor Rudolf II acquire it for his Kunstkammer, here set his golden-brown hare in a striking arrangement of nearly life-size plants, an imaginative combination of individual nature studies unique in the tradition of German nature study when it was painted about 1585. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.