The Small Piece of Turf (Tuft of Grass: Minor)

White flowers shine out of a dark cushion of earth. Rounded leaflets rise behind them, long grass blades reach into the empty background, and broad, ribbed leaves turn towards the viewer. Albrecht Dürer’s Small Piece of Turf brings this crowded plant group so close that a few inches of vegetation become an entire world. The ALBERTINA in Vienna currently attributes the sheet to Dürer and dates it, with a question mark, to about 1495–1500. Measuring just 11.7 by 14.7 centimetres, it is painted in opaque colours, heightened with white, on exceptionally fine, smoothed and polished parchment. ^[1]

Its small dimensions matter. A reproduction enlarged on a screen can make the plants seem expansive and the brushwork relatively broad. At the original scale, the minute divisions of the foliage and the small white petals demand concentrated attention. The painting holds together as a dense green mound, then breaks into a succession of separate encounters: a leaf’s pale midrib, a curling stem, the dark gap behind a flower. Its appeal comes partly from that movement between a whole we can grasp immediately and particulars that take time to discover.

A crowded miniature

The group is wider than it is high, although several upward accents prevent it from becoming a flat band. Towards the centre, a long blade sweeps up and left from the crowded base. Beside it, a broad leaf rises like a folded spearhead. Higher clusters of rounded leaflets balance these pointed forms. At the far left, a thin, almost solitary grass blade leaves a generous interval of bare background between itself and the main growth. Such intervals make the packed centre feel more substantial: the plants have air around them even where their stems become difficult to disentangle.

The foreground offers a different rhythm. Large leaves spread sideways, overlap, and bend down towards the lower edge. One long, dark green leaf runs diagonally across the left foreground, while a paler, strongly ribbed leaf hangs almost vertically near the centre. On the right, another blade curls back upon itself, exposing a lighter surface. Looking from one to the next, we become aware of the different directions in which light meets each form. Green functions here as a range of distinct surfaces, from deep, almost black recesses to yellowish ridges and cool, pale folds.

The white flowers provide a second route through the tangle. A high blossom on the left is answered by a smaller one below and farther right; another cluster appears near the middle foreground. Lowest of all, a flower droops over the dark earth on a slender stem. This last detail is especially effective. Its downward movement carries the eye out of the compressed foliage, and the pale petals remain readable against the nearly black ground. The flowers punctuate the greens without forming a regular decorative border. Their unequal heights help the growth appear irregular and alive.

There is also variety within the leaves themselves. Some are broad and continuous, with prominent parallel ridges; others consist of repeated rounded leaflets. Fine, divided foliage threads between these larger shapes. A viewer does not need a complete botanical inventory to follow these distinctions. Indeed, attending first to edges, veins, attachments and changes of direction reveals how much information the painter supplies through form. The familiar appearance of the plants encourages recognition, while their entanglement keeps recognition from becoming a quick exercise in naming.

Below them, the dark area has a rounded, spreading outline. At its edges, strokes become looser and more exposed, particularly on the right, where curved marks follow the swelling mass. Above, the foliage is defined by much smaller decisions. That change in handling gives the plant group weight while preserving the delicacy of its upper growth. The earth does not dissolve into a distant landscape. It forms a compact base against an otherwise unoccupied field, leaving the viewer to concentrate on the encounter between vegetation, darkness and the pale surrounding surface.

The catalogue’s description of opaque colour and white heightening helps explain the appearance of the miniature. Pale edges and petals can stand distinctly against dark passages. The tiny white accents are especially conspicuous because the picture offers so little empty brightness within the mound itself. Meanwhile, the untouched-looking background gives the green silhouettes a clear outer boundary. The image alternates between substantial, overlapping growth and a remarkably flat surrounding field. Its convincing depth is generated locally, wherever one stem crosses another or a leaf folds over its neighbour. ^[1]

Beside the Great Piece of Turf

Dürer’s much larger Great Piece of Turf , dated 1503, is a separate work in the same museum: inventory 3075, on paper, rather than this small parchment sheet, inventory 3077. Seen together, the two compositions organise vegetation very differently. The larger sheet is upright, and tall grasses carry its movement far above the low leaves. Its lower edge exposes a broken, uneven terrain. In the small work, the broad leaves, rounded leaflets and white blossoms gather into a more compact, almost self-contained body. The dense dark base helps bind their outward movements together. ^[12]

The difference is more revealing than the resemblance in their modern titles. In the large sheet, the eye can travel upwards along the slender grasses and then fall back into a crowded lower zone. In the small sheet, the most insistent movements pass across and through the mound: the long foreground diagonal, the repeated flowerheads, and the folded leaves on the right. A common subject allows two quite different experiences of space. The smaller work’s date remains qualified, and resemblance alone cannot establish that it was a preliminary design for the larger one.

Heinz Widauer’s account of the Great Piece of Turf , published in 2003 and reproduced in its collection record, stresses deliberate composition and proposes that the plants were assembled in the studio. That essay also reflects an earlier, restrictive view of Dürer’s surviving plant studies following Fritz Koreny’s 1985 reassessment. It is a historically important position, but the small parchment group has subsequently been reconsidered. ^[12]

A changing attribution history

The ALBERTINA’s 2019 exhibition, curated by Christof Metzger, argued for returning several parchment plant studies to Dürer, placing them after his first Venetian journey and before 1500. Its discussion names the Violets , Columbine and Celandine , rejects objections based on allegedly inadequate quality, and suggests that the sheets might survive from a model book serving the young workshop. The model-book proposal is explicitly a possibility, not a documented commission. This broader reassessment provides a useful setting for the museum’s current attribution and tentative early dating of the Small Piece of Turf . ^[13]

The debate draws attention to a real difficulty in looking at such works. Minute accuracy, carefully separated outlines and a high degree of finish are immediately attractive, but they do not independently identify a painter. The different supports and effects of paint must also be considered. Nor can an association with an old collection settle every question about a sheet’s making. The present museum label supplies the responsible point of departure; the history of disagreement explains why its small question mark deserves to remain visible.

A later, securely identified plant study makes the problem more concrete. Hans Hoffmann’s A Small Piece of Turf of 1584, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bears his intertwined initials. Freyda Spira’s catalogue entry describes it as an emulation of Dürer’s larger turf study, with a composition of its own. She also relates it to Hoffmann’s later painting of a hare among plants and explains that a sheet could serve a preparatory purpose while also being collected as an independent work. ^[14]

In Hoffmann’s picture, upright grasses fan out across an airy horizontal field, and an insect perches conspicuously towards the upper right. These features immediately distinguish it from the tightly packed, white-flowered parchment miniature in Vienna. The comparison gives substance to the idea of an artistic tradition: an artist could learn from Dürer’s close attention to ordinary vegetation and make a different arrangement under his own name. It also shows why a shared title or a convincing botanical appearance needs to be followed by the identification of the actual object.

The sheet’s collecting history

The small Vienna work has an unusually apt early description. The ALBERTINA identifies it with drawing 32 in the 1588 list of Willibald Imhoff’s Kunstbuch , described there as white little flowers and grass on parchment. The museum records its transfer to Emperor Rudolf II in 1588, its later place in the imperial treasury and, from 1783, the court library, before it entered Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen’s collection in 1796. The old description, quoted by the modern catalogue, singles out precisely what remains most arresting today: white blossoms emerging from an intricate green mass. ^[1]

Returning to the image after that history, the little hanging flower at the bottom becomes a useful place to pause. Almost everything around it presses upwards or sideways, yet its stem bends down into the darkest part of the sheet. Above, a pale leaf points towards it, and the neighbouring diagonal leads back into the mound. Such small relationships keep the eye circulating through the plants. The Small Piece of Turf rewards the kind of sustained looking its scale invites, turning a modest cluster of growth into a carefully articulated experience of colour, overlap and light.