Animals

A hare gathers its body into a compact shape; a bird’s wing opens into a broad fan. In each, small marks make a large form legible. Looking at Dürer’s animals means changing scale: following the edge of a claw, then taking in a whole silhouette; noticing one pale feather, then the dark succession beside it. This guide moves between those encounters and follows the images into study, invention and later copying.

Margaret Doyle’s National Gallery of Art account notes that the exceptionally finished nature studies were not necessarily preparations for other compositions. The twenty-six entries below preserve familiar titles while identifying the particular sheets behind them. Observation, invention and reception meet in this catalogue, where attribution, date and history belong to each object. ^[1]

Looking at fur and feathers

The Young Hare of 1502 was already a celebrated ALBERTINA picture when Charles Ephrussi discussed the nature studies in 1882. Watercolour and opaque colour have white heightening. Light comes from the left, leaving the ground darker to the right. Inside the nearer eye, a tiny pale rectangle interrupts the dark pupil. Its size matters: something that occupies so little of the page can change how we imagine the space beyond its edges. ^{[4] [5]}

Look at the unevenness of the two ears. One opens broadly towards us; the other rises like a narrow blade. Across the back, pale curls interrupt the brown coat in little clusters, while around the eyes the marks become short and close. Below the nose, black whiskers cross the lighter chest and continue into empty space. The outline itself changes character: a clear edge at a claw gives way to loose hairs around the belly. Those changes make the body feel gathered together without turning it into a hard, continuous silhouette.

Ephrussi’s response shows how readily looking can become a story about making. He praised the hare’s alert eye, erect ears and soft fur, then imagined an effortless burst of execution without repeated correction. The first observations can be checked against the picture; the imagined performance cannot. His account remains valuable as a nineteenth-century encounter with the work, while its confidence invites caution. A convincing animal does not supply an uninterrupted record of a living model sitting before the painter. ^[4]

Ephrussi also paired a dead blue bird with a separate wing in the ALBERTINA. His discussion gives them an important place among the highly finished nature pictures, and his notes distinguish originals from later copies. Yet he accepted 1512 as their date. The example makes an old catalogue useful in two ways: it records the attention these sheets had already attracted, and it shows that inherited dates need to be tested rather than repeated. ^[4]

Friedrich Winkler’s 1938 catalogue describes both sheets as watercolour and bodycolour on parchment, with gold heightening on the whole bird. His account gives their finish a different emphasis from Ephrussi’s imagined effortless performance. For Winkler, the bird had been built up through so many layers that its making had become difficult to reconstruct. The smooth final effect could conceal a complicated accumulation. His comparisons of later versions remained provisional despite repeated inspection. The experienced catalogue author distinguished observation from unresolved relationships. ^[6]

ALBERTINA currently dates both sheets c.1500 and records fine polished parchment with white heightening. The 1512 inscriptions do not securely date execution. The bird’s fine gold breast lines suggest iridescence; purpose remains uncertain. The wing likewise combines watercolour, gouache and white heightening. ^{[5] [1]}

The wing spreads towards the lower left, where long, dark feathers form a succession of pointed ends. Further up, the shapes shorten and overlap like scales. The whole bird produces a different rhythm: its head stretches upwards, its tail narrows downwards, and the two wings hang along the sides. Between them, the feet introduce a brittle, angular interruption. Looking from one sheet to the other, we exchange a broad fan of colour for a long body organised around a central axis. A detached part and a complete creature demand different arrangements on the page.

Dürer's Stag Beetle , dated 1505, makes a much smaller animal occupy its own pictorial world. The Getty records watercolour and gouache on a sheet measuring 14.1 by 11.4 centimetres. It also identifies an added upper left corner, including the tip of the left antenna painted by another hand. Even a familiar reproduction therefore contains a small intervention from the object's later life. Transparent washes can carry a shadow, while covering paint gives solidity to the wing cases. Moving between thin and opaque passages helps distinguish darkness beneath the body from light caught on its hard surface. ^[7]

The beetle's legs refuse symmetry. On one side they reach into the open ground; on the other they fold closer around the body. Their hooked endings seem almost too slight to support the substantial reddish wing cases. Above, the branching mandibles open around a pale gap that becomes as conspicuous as any painted part. Along the lower body, narrow highlights stop and restart at the joints. The eye can follow each limb separately, then return to the compact mass from which it springs.

Demonstration pieces

Metzger proposed in 2019 that finished nature studies demonstrated Dürer’s command of pen and brush to workshop visitors, preserving knowledge and displaying accomplishment. No documented visitor’s response establishes that independent purpose for a particular sheet. ^[8]

Dürer's own writing helps explain why observation and invention could sustain one another. In the third book on human proportion, as translated in William Martin Conway's 1889 Literary Remains , he describes artistic ability as something acquired through prolonged study. What enters the mind from outside can later appear in a new work. A practised artist need not copy every particular figure directly from life; the forms accumulated through experience remain available for invention. This is a theory of cultivated memory, rather than permission to invent without learning. ^[9]

The surrounding pages make that distinction more precise. Dürer insists that practical skill and understanding must develop together. Someone can possess a description of a figure and still be unable to draw it. Conversely, a trained hand can work without measuring every part afresh because earlier learning has developed judgement. His discussion concerns human figures, and its categories belong to his own historical world. Applied cautiously to the animals, it offers a useful question: what has the artist retained, and how has he made that knowledge serve a new image? It does not identify the model for any particular study. ^[9]

Changing a pose and reusing a form

The Art Institute of Chicago's Young Bull , about 1496, preserves visible changes around the hind foot, back, muzzle and horns; an earlier version had an open mouth. The museum considers it probably a study from nature. It also identifies the hindquarters as material reused in The Prodigal Son amid the Swine . The drawing's 1508 inscription is erroneous and in another hand. Both the changed pose and the changed setting show that a study could remain useful without being reproduced as a complete animal. ^[10]

Berlin's Lobster , signed and dated 1495, offers a broader, more loosely handled comparison. Pen, brown and black wash, and white heightening describe it on paper now discoloured and abraded. The 1999 Berlin–Basel catalogue treats it as independent study material. Its proposed Venetian circumstances should remain a proposal, rather than a documented live encounter. ^[11]

The animal stretches almost horizontally across its sheet, but the claws and antennae pull away in different directions. One great claw opens towards the lower right; an antenna rises towards the opposite corner. The much smaller legs gather beneath the head and body. That change of scale gives the creature its peculiar force: the largest forms are grasping or reaching, while the central structure seems crowded with delicate attachments. The picture remains readable even where the darker paper makes its finer marks difficult to separate.

Dürer's Greyhound at Windsor, about 1500, connects an isolated animal with the engraving Saint Eustace . Freyda Spira traces a further stage in this history: Virgil Solis's drawing of 1549 quotes the alert dog from Dürer's print, adding ground and vegetation. She considers it possible that Solis also knew the preparatory drawing. In his etching Six Dogs , five animals repeat Dürer's dogs in reverse. A narrative print could become a store of detachable motifs for another artist, with copying, reversal and a changed setting all participating in the new work. ^[12]

The Ambrosiana's Parrot supplies another connection between a separate bird and a larger composition. Robert Randolf Coleman's catalogue identifies the drawing as Dürer's and relates it to the 1504 Adam and Eve and drawings of the Virgin with animals. It records pen, grey-black ink and watercolour on paper. Its 1513 inscription is attributed, tentatively, to Hans Süss von Kulmbach. A written date therefore cannot simply override the proposed relationship to earlier works. The sheet asks to be understood through its particular history, as well as through the recognisable bird. ^[13]

Lions seen, remembered and constructed

The Netherlandish diary provides unusually direct evidence for looking at an animal. During the Ghent visit of April 1521, Dürer recorded seeing lions and drawing one with a metal point. He also noted a tip to the lions' keepers and the church sacristan. The encounter belongs within a densely social journey: artists welcomed him, showed him paintings and ate with him. In the diary's sequence, animal drawing and the study of other artists' work share the same days. The document records an opportunity and an action; identifying a surviving sheet requires a further argument. ^[9]

Hans Mielke connected Berlin's Two Seated Lions , silverpoint on prepared paper, with that Ghent visit. He interpreted the two views as one animal studied twice. Silverpoint requires prepared paper to receive the metal's fine trace. The leaf belongs to the dispersed travelling sketchbook; its reverse carries a portrait and landscape made at different stages of the journey. ^[11]

On the animal side, the profile head nearly touches the left edge, while the frontal head sits higher. Broad paws occupy the lower part of the page, beneath the much more densely marked heads. Long strands in the manes flow downwards and curl outwards; short marks tighten around the muzzle and eyes. Heads and paws provide the clearest accents; the more lightly marked bodies fade into the open paper.

The coloured Lion of 1494 in Hamburg has a different character. Petra Roettig's museum account reviews proposals for its construction from heraldic or Venetian models and another animal's body. It does not establish a sitting before a living lion. Watercolour, opaque colour and gold on parchment give this small image a richly finished surface; its possible function as a greeting, study or model remains unsettled. It is a useful reminder that Dürer's animal imagery includes the adaptation of existing forms as well as direct observation. ^[14]

The other coloured Lion , in Vienna, is assigned to Dürer, c.1495–1500 (?), despite its 1521 inscription and historical attribution doubts. ^[5]

An animal assembled from information

The Rhinoceros of 1515 developed from information about an Indian rhinoceros brought to Lisbon, which Dürer never saw. The British Museum considers his preparatory pen drawing probably dependent on a newsletter, perhaps accompanied by sketches now lost. That route remains qualified. The drawing faces left; the woodcut faces right. Their relationship allows us to follow a particular conception across media while recognising how much the artist had to construct from transmitted information. ^[2]

The woodcut makes the beast's body read almost as a set of fitted coverings. A large flank folds down between two heavily marked bands; little circles, ridges and scales give each area a different surface. The shoulder rises into a small horn, and the neck gathers into scalloped folds. Underneath, the belly is comparatively soft and dark. The eye moves easily from one texture to the next because each occupies a clearly bounded zone. The separate zones remain legible while belonging to one massive body.

Woodcut prints from raised, inked surfaces left on a cut block. Engraving holds ink in incisions in metal; etching uses acid to bite lines into a plate. These differences matter when following Dürer's animals into circulation. The Rhinoceros is a woodcut design, capable of yielding many impressions, rather than an etching. ^[15]

The British Museum's Head of a Walrus , dated 1521, leads from an unusual creature towards fantasy. Current commentary favours a dead, perhaps preserved specimen; the diary records no walrus encounter. The head subsequently reappears in reverse as the dragon led by Saint Margaret in a composition study of 1522. Joining the whale expedition to this drawing makes a firmer connection than the evidence permits. What survives is more interesting: a strange observed form becoming available for an imagined creature. ^[16]

Following animals through a composition

The Virgin with a Multitude of Animals also invites comparison between compositions. Winkler catalogued it alongside Berlin and Paris versions, tracing changed format and increasing detail. Widauer reads the enclosed Marian garden’s creatures and plants as divine creation, its tethered fox as controlled evil. The Nativity unfolds beyond; dating is c.1506. ^{[6] [5]}

Suzanne Boorsch explains a different scheme in the 1504 Adam and Eve : cat, rabbit, ox and elk represent the choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic temperaments. Animal variety becomes a way of thinking about human nature. Such a reading can coexist with an engraving's concentrated description of bodies and surfaces. ^[15]

The cat at the foot of the central tree turns towards a mouse near Adam's toes. Behind Eve's lower leg, the rabbit folds into a much smaller space; further back, the ox's broad muzzle emerges from darkness. These placements create different distances and scales within the forest. Looking for the animals makes the eye move away from the two illuminated bodies and into the darker intervals around them. Small creatures help articulate the space as well as populate it.

A long-beaked bird opens its wings beneath GI GI GIG. Winkler read these letters as its cry and recorded the date 1513. The title Draft for a Book Sign: Crane establishes neither species nor bookplate function. Rowlands proposes a tournament device, perhaps shown to a client for approval. Finish can serve a design’s presentation without proving an autonomous picture. ^{[6] [17]}

Copying Dürer and naming another artist

Hans Hoffmann had access to the Imhoff collection and became Rudolf II's court painter in 1585. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum's 2022 exhibition distinguished his close copies, free variations and independent nature studies. Some sheets carry his initials, others Dürer's monogram. The range resists a single explanation of copying as fraud. The exhibition also identified a crowned crane studied from a preserved specimen in Rudolf's collection: lifelike detail cannot establish a live model. Close observation, artistic borrowing and collecting could operate together within the same practice. ^[3]

Cleveland's Dead Blue Roller , signed by Hoffmann and dated 1583, supplies a concrete comparison with Dürer's original in Vienna. It uses watercolour and gouache with touches of gold on paper. The museum interprets the signature and date as evidence that it was not intended to pass as Dürer's own sheet. A faithful copy could announce another maker. ^[18]

Collecting brought the sheets into a second kind of order. Kiefhaber’s 1803 publication prints Anna Imhoff’s letter of 30 December 1588 to the emperor. She describes a collection her husband had intended to keep within the family, then explains its dispatch to Prague. The adjacent inventory places a bird on parchment and a wing on parchment beside a little hare and a lion on parchment. Its compact labels preserve something different from a modern catalogue: a sequence of valued things, with little attempt to describe their appearance. The list can document collecting without supplying all the authorship and dating judgements now attached to the objects. Heller’s 1827 catalogue identifies the roller and wing as coming from the Imhoff collection. He also describes the imperial collection and the exchange of drawings from the Court Library for Duke Albert’s prints. His description of the new mounts connects ownership with preservation and display. The pair entered Albert’s collection in 1796. ^{[19] [20] [5]}

The hare bearing 1528 and an AD monogram is likewise a particular later work. Berlin now catalogues KdZ 1271 as Hans Hoffmann after Dürer, about 1580–85, in opaque colour on parchment. Its inscribed year does not date its making. Hoffmann turns the animal towards us: recognition of the famous model becomes part of a new encounter. The name Hare (1528) remains useful for finding this image, provided the attribution accompanies it. ^[21]

Two Squirrels is also Hoffmann's work, recorded in a private collection. Ksenija Tschetschik-Hammerl examines its false 1512 and AD beside the artist's use of his own monogram. She distinguishes later Imhoff attempts to sell Hoffmann works as Dürers from proof that an earlier collector had commissioned fraud. Her argument makes the reception more exact: a false authorship claim is visible on the object, while its original circumstances and later marketing still require separate evidence. The image's appeal survives the change of artist. ^[22]

Finding the particular sheet

Familiar titles can conceal a securely identifiable object. Head of a Stag is the coloured Head of a Roebuck in Bayonne, inventory 655, which the Musée Bonnat-Helleu dates about 1502–03. The owner records watercolour and white gouache on cream laid paper, with a gold border. It is distinct from the grey-ink roebuck head at the Nelson-Atkins Museum. Matching the sheet prevents one animal's history from slipping into another's. ^[23]

Garza means heron in Spanish. The image corresponds to Berlin's Reiher , KdZ 17654, shown in its 2023 worklist as Dürer's watercolour on parchment mounted on paper, dated 1515. The bird and the separate study of a leg occupy the same sheet. The title is therefore a useful multilingual doorway to a specific drawing, rather than evidence for an additional animal in Dürer's oeuvre. ^[24]

The Louvre’s Oiseau dit casse-noix , inventory 17 DR recto, is catalogued as Dürer’s pen-and-watercolour drawing, without an execution year. Its title describes a bird “called a nutcracker”, preserving a naming history. The bird’s wing has a conspicuous blue-and-black panel against a brown body. This makes a jay a useful visual comparison. Appearance alone cannot supply a date or provenance. ^[25]

The Escorial studies need a different qualification. A Royal Collections notice of January 2025 lists a monkey and a bird seen from front, side and rear among works by a follower of Dürer. The latter title corresponds closely to the familiar three-view bullfinch sheet, historically labelled Parrot in Three Positions . The notice does not give an individual inventory or execution date. Its qualified authorship belongs beside that traditional title; the three views are not a second parrot study by Dürer established through repetition of his name. ^[26]

For the matching Monkey , Almudena Pérez de Tudela and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend provide a more specific scholarly identification: an anonymous, possibly Flemish artist, oil on paper, in Philip II's quarters at El Escorial. Their account places such animal portraits within royal collecting and display. This small picture belongs to the wider history of nature imagery associated with Dürer's reputation, while its maker remains unnamed. ^[27]

The Stork belongs to the Musée d'Ixelles, whose 2021 exhibition documentation catalogues it as Dürer's work. It identifies JBW 136 as a pen drawing on paper and dates it 1500–05. That dating differs from the 1517 written above the bird. As with other sheets in this guide, the inscription needs to be considered separately from the present assessment of when the work was drawn. ^[28]

Little Owl is attributed to Dürer, 1502 or 1508 (?); 1508 and AD are by another hand. ^[5]

Boijmans Van Beuningen lists the Crab as previously attributed to Dürer. Older descriptive wording on its website still discusses a Venetian origin under his name, but that inherited narrative should not conceal the structured attribution. The image can remain worth studying while the identity of its maker is reconsidered. Its place in a historical Dürer catalogue records an association, rather than restoring the withdrawn attribution. ^[29]

Besançon's Bat has also changed authors. In 2024 the museum announced that renewed study assigned it to an anonymous artist of the Dürer Renaissance, the later revival of his art. The announcement does not set out a full technical argument. It nevertheless supplies the museum's assessment and explains why the celebrated bat appears here with a former-attribution qualification. Admiration for a creature's convincing presence need not depend on retaining its old label. ^[30]