A Hare Bearing the Date 1528 (Hans Hoffmann)

The hare lowers its head towards us, its long ears rising above a broad, rounded body. One forepaw reaches down the sheet, ending in dark claws; whiskers spread across the empty ground. Beneath the animal stand the date 1528 and Albrecht Dürer’s familiar AD monogram. Yet this painting belongs to the later history of Dürer’s art. Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett identifies its maker as Hans Hoffmann, working after Dürer, and dates it to about 1580–85. Painted in gouache on parchment, it measures 35.5 × 26 centimetres and bears the inventory number KdZ 1271. ^[1]

That distinction brings a second artist into view. Hoffmann understood how convincingly a painted animal could occupy an otherwise empty sheet. He also changed the encounter: the famous hare turns towards us, and the surface of its coat becomes an intricate display of curls, short strokes and glinting hairs. The image invites us to recognise Dürer while looking closely at what another painter has made of him.

A face beneath two tall ears

Seen from slightly above, the animal forms a long oval that narrows towards the muzzle. The large curve of its back fills the upper half of the parchment. Its lowered head rests within that mass, with the eyes set far apart on either side. This compressed arrangement makes the ears especially prominent. The ear on the viewer’s left rises almost upright; the other leans outwards, opening a wedge of pale background between them. Their unequal angles keep the strongly frontal image from settling into symmetry.

The ears have a texture of their own. Their dark interiors are covered with minute light marks, while pale strips run along parts of their edges. Beneath them, the hair on the forehead tightens into tiny overlapping curls. Across the rounded back, longer strokes bend and gather in flowing bands. Along the cheek and breast, they become finer and more directional. Following these changes is a way of feeling the shape through the painted surface: short, dense hair pulls the face together, and the longer coat enlarges the body around it.

Light and dark give the hare weight before individual hairs come into focus. A warm, lighter flank occupies the left side of the image, while a deep brown area runs down the right. Pale touches catch the bridge of the nose and the fur around the mouth. The eyes look glossy against their lighter rims. Long black whiskers cross several different areas of colour and extend well beyond the face, drawing attention to the extraordinary fineness of the marks.

The projecting paw gives this dense body a point of contact with the ground. Its smoother, warmer colouring interrupts the surrounding fur, and the claws provide a sharp ending to its soft outline. Behind the animal, a grey shadow spreads towards the right. There is no grass, stone or interior furnishing to locate it. That small amount of shadow is enough to suggest a resting surface; the unpainted space around the body lets the silhouette remain immediately legible. The lower margin also leaves room for the inscription, close enough to the paw to become part of our movement through the picture. ^[1]

How Hoffmann changes the familiar hare

Dürer’s Young Hare of 1502, now in the ALBERTINA in Vienna, provides the essential comparison. The earlier sheet measures 25.1 × 22.6 centimetres, making Hoffmann’s parchment substantially taller. The ALBERTINA records watercolour and opaque colour with white heightening, and traces of preliminary drawing at the right ear. It also identifies the date and monogram below the animal. The two works share a tightly framed, crouching hare, raised ears, painstakingly differentiated fur and an almost vacant setting. These features establish a family resemblance even before the names are read. ^[5]

The change of viewpoint alters the balance of the whole animal. Dürer’s hare faces towards the right, with its head turned enough for one eye and cheek to dominate. Its forepaws lie together at the lower right, continuing the diagonal movement of the body. Hoffmann brings the face round towards the viewer and lowers it within the outline of the back. One paw is particularly conspicuous below the body. The arrangement feels enclosed and vertical, carrying the eye from the ear tips down through the face to the projecting paw.

The handling of the coat is equally revealing. In Dürer’s sheet, bands of longer hair sweep across the side and breast, with different colours helping separate the overlapping masses. Hoffmann’s forehead and left flank contain conspicuous little loops and waves, repeated closely enough to become a surface rhythm. They can be enjoyed both as fur and as evidence of the brush at work. His animal retains the compact alertness of the earlier design while offering a different pattern of visual attention.

Such a comparison explains why “after Dürer” is useful: it acknowledges the model while allowing us to see alterations. It does not establish the exact means by which this particular composition was produced. In his 1921 Berlin catalogue, Elfried Bock proposed that it might depend on a Dürer work no longer known. That remains a possibility expressed by an earlier cataloguer. The surviving 1502 sheet provides a secure point of comparison without requiring us to reconstruct a lost drawing or an undocumented studio procedure. ^[12]

What the date can tell us

The inscription creates the picture’s most immediate historical puzzle. Its 1528 belongs to the year of Dürer’s death; Berlin dates the work itself more than fifty years later. A painted date and the date assigned to an object therefore answer different questions here. The inscription connects the animal to Dürer’s identity, while the museum’s attribution and chronology place its production within Hoffmann’s career. ^[1]

This discrepancy has long been recognised. Bock’s 1921 entry already described the date and AD monogram, rejected the inscription as authentic, and accepted the traditional attribution to Hoffmann. His measurements, 355 × 260 millimetres, also agree with Berlin’s present dimensions. The hare’s identity as a later work is consequently well established in its catalogue history. The inscription alone cannot explain who applied the marks, when they were added or what a particular purchaser was told. ^[12]

Johanna Hornauer uses this very hare in her study of later artistic responses to Dürer. She draws attention to the combination of the altered viewpoint, the famous initials and the date of the master’s death, treating the work as evidence of an early association between the hare motif and Dürer’s name. Recognition depends on an animal and a name working together. Calling the image a memorial, however, would give a specific intention to a sheet whose original purpose remains uncertain. ^[13]

The marks also change our experience of looking. Below the eyes, ears and fur, we encounter a compact assertion of authorship. It asks the viewer to place the painted achievement within an artist’s reputation. Today the distance between that assertion and the museum label is part of the work’s interest: the image preserves both an act of imitation and the prestige of the model it invokes.

A skilled painter in a culture of collecting

Hoffmann had access to important Dürer drawings in the Nuremberg collection of Willibald Imhoff. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum’s 2022 exhibition described a practice that included close copies, free variations and independent works. Hoffmann repeatedly returned to the hare, sometimes preserving its isolated setting and sometimes surrounding it with plants. His appointment as Rudolf II’s court painter in 1585 placed these interests within an imperial culture of collecting. For the Berlin animal, that context helps explain why the older master’s nature studies could remain productive models decades after his death. ^[14]

Copying could display considerable skill. A painter had to sustain the animal’s rounded form while controlling innumerable small marks, and make the result coherent at both a glance and close range. Hoffmann’s frontal hare makes those demands visible. The repeated curls are held within larger areas of light and shadow, and the long whiskers cut across them without dissolving the face. Close looking moves between the convincing creature and the patiently worked surface.

The historical meanings of such imitation require equal care. In her study of Dürer’s monogram, Ksenija Tschetschik-Hammerl examines how Hoffmann’s use of AD coexisted with works carrying his own initials. She also challenges the inference that later dishonest sales by Willibald Imhoff’s grandson establish fraudulent intentions on the part of the earlier collector. Her argument allows admiration, artistic ambition and the possibility of deception to be considered separately. It supplies a framework for the Berlin sheet without settling the circumstances of its inscription. ^[15]

The ALBERTINA’s account of the hare’s reception records later offers in which authorship and valuations shifted, as well as copies acknowledged under Hoffmann’s name. These transactions reveal how much could turn on the identity attached to a meticulously painted animal. They do not provide a documented sale history for Berlin’s parchment. Here the strongest evidence remains the object itself: a hare made newly imposing through its frontal pose, an inscribed appeal to Dürer’s authority, and a surface through which Hoffmann’s own sustained attention can still be followed. ^[5]