This is no cuddly cottontail. Here we see a jackrabbit that Alice in Wonderland would have called a March Hare, and what Aesop quite accurately described in “The Tortoise and the Hare.”
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) would have known and observed this rabbit species in the meadows of his beloved Germany. The hare of his memory was wild, strong, and fast. Its long, large ears captured every sound, especially of danger on the open ground where the creature made its home. Such animals would have been difficult to capture much less paint in the wild, as hares could flee from sight in the blink of an eye.
His 1502 watercolor, “Young Hare” (originally titled “Feldhase,” or “Field Hare”), portrays the furry creature as almost animated. Although hares were seen as pests that overran the grasslands, the animal is rendered respectfully here; we can almost sense what it’s thinking.
Superb Detail
As positioned, the animal’s tension is palpable, which gives a sense that the hare might move off the paper at any moment. Tom Gurney’s History of Art website says: “We have a single figure without a background, and a perfectly captured moment of stillness and alertness. A sound or a slight change in the wind, and the head will tilt or the ears twitch, and the hare will have gone.”The hare’s eye shows the reflection of a window, which could indicate that the work was done in a studio. A light source out of view on the left gives off a soft shadow to the right of the hare. Its large ears are upright and turned to the side, as if to capture every sound in its environment.
Dürer mastered every technique of watercolor. The use of brown tones and shades, as well as dabs applied by brushes of various thickness, suggests a pelt of thick fur overlaid with protruding hairs. The artist applied various brushstrokes—long, short, thick, light—to display the real hide of a hare in the wild. A dark undercolor wash forms the body of the figure. A white gouache (thick watercolor) on the belly, cheeks, and edges of an ear blend beautifully with the hare’s other natural fur tones.
Dürer, a man of the Northern Renaissance, worked hard to perfect all of his skills as painter, engraver, draughtsman, writer, and theorist, and he researched all the emerging sciences of his day. His study of the natural sciences, applied with his amazing talent as an artist, allowed him to depict animals, both exotic and commonplace, as realistically as possible and in every detail. Dürer dated and signed this work with his iconic A draped around the D, in the lower foreground.
