Hans Hoffmann’s touching depiction of a Hare, with its richly coloured, almost tangibly soft fur and sense of poised calm, is one of the finest of a remarkable group of gouaches and watercolours of animals, birds and plants that the artist executed – some, like this, on vellum, and some on paper – during the last quarter of the 16th century. They are among the most accomplished and simply beautiful representations of the natural world produced anywhere in Europe during the early modern period, and have been widely appreciated by scholars and collectors ever since they were made. Indeed, no lesser patron that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) took Hoffmann into his service in 1585, commissioning him to make drawings and paintings of similar subjects, which formed an essential part of the sumptuous cabinet of treasures and curiosities that this great patron of the arts was creating at his Prague court.
Hans Hoffmann was born in Nuremberg, probably around 1530, and from a relatively early age he must have been immersed in the works, in all media, of his illustrious fellow-Nuremberger, the so-called ‘German Apelles’, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Certainly from the early 1570s, and perhaps before, Hoffmann was very active in making drawings, and some paintings, that are either straightforward copies after Dürer or reinterpretations of the earlier master’s themes and compositions. As such, Hoffmann was a pivotal figure in the ‘Dürer-Renaissance’ that swept across central Europe in the last quarter of the 16th century.
The works by Dürer that had the most profound effect on Hoffmann, and provoked what are unquestionably the later master’s finest creations, were the extraordinary and revolutionary drawings and watercolours of the natural world. Many of these iconic watercolours would shortly make their way to the collection of Rudolf II in Prague, and later to the Albertina in Vienna, but in the 1560s and ‘70s they were still in Nuremberg, having passed from the ownership of Dürer’s closest friend, Willibald Pirckheimer (1470-1530), to the latter’s grandson, the merchant Willibald Imhoff (1519-1580). It must have been to Imhoff’s collection that Hoffmann went to make his first copies after Dürer.
In 1574, Hoffmann made the first of several copies of Dürer‘s famous watercolour of a Stag Beetle1, and this was followed by a number of other natural history watercolours, which vary greatly in their compositional closeness to prototypes by Dürer. The magnificent 1578 watercolour of a squirrel, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.2, cannot, for example, be directly related to any known work by Dürer, and the Metropolitan Museum’s Small Piece of Turf (1584)3, though clearly inspired in concept by Dürer’s extraordinary study of a clump of grass, the Great Piece of Turf (1503)4, is entirely different in composition. On the other hand, Hoffmann made several very close copies of other watercolours by Dürer, such as the Blue Roller, and the Left Wing of a Blue Roller.5
The Dürer watercolour that seems to have provoked the most complex and revealing response from Hoffmann was, however, the Hare (1502), a marvel of natural history representation that has always been rightly considered one of the greatest treasures of the Albertina (fig. 1).6 Over a period of some years, Hoffmann made at least six, and perhaps as many as eight, watercolours and paintings inspired by Dürer’s masterpiece, each one reinterpreting the original in a different way.7 The present work, executed in 1582, is the closest in composition to its prototype, showing the hare sitting motionless, but seemingly ready to dash off at the first hint of danger, with no indication of a setting except for some summary shadows to the right. The next in the sequence would appear to be the very large watercolour, also dated 1582, in which the hare, now slightly more stylised, is surrounded by a mass of flowers, plants and small animals.8 Another variant, also including plants but less elaborate in composition, is in Rome.9 Then, around 1583-5, Hoffmann made an even grander version, this time in oils, in which the hare is once again surrounded by a veritable botanical garden of carefully depicted specimens.10 The painting (fig. 2), now in the Getty Museum, is not dated, but its execution can be located with some certainty as it depends on plant studies that are dated 1583, and in 1585 Hoffmann was paid for making it by the Emperor Rudolf II. Fritz Koreny, in the catalogue of his fundamental exhibition on Dürer’s natural history studies and their legacy, also cited two more versions of the Hare by Hoffmann, one of which, in Berlin, bears a false Dürer monogram and date.11
From this series of works by Hoffmann, it is clear that he was very much the interpreter, rather than the copyist, of Dürer, a conclusion that is further highlighted by comparison of a detail of the present work (fig. 3) with the corresponding section of Dürer’s Hare (fig. 4). Despite their near-identical compositions (Hoffmann even repeats the tiny reflection of Dürer’s studio window in the hare’s right eye), the two works could hardly be more different in terms of technique and handling. Dürer’s image is a sober record of the essence of the animal, rendered in a fairly narrow range of colours, with great naturalism but using brushstrokes of a width that impart a degree of stylisation. Hoffmann in contrast, working not on paper but on the more extravagant support of vellum, employed a much greater variety of colours, and contrasted broader tonal passages with minutely rendered individual hairs, to create an astonishingly life-like representation of fur. His is an image of richness, texture and luxury, befitting the opulent, courtly world of the likes of Rudolf II, whereas Dürer’s more restrained technique feels more at home in the pious and spiritual, Lutheran world of 80 years earlier. It is astonishing how different two images that seem at first sight almost identical can actually be.
Right: Fig 4 Hans Hoffmann, A Hare (detail, lot 21)
The role of Rudolf II in Hoffmann’s dialogue with the legacy of Dürer remains unclear. What we do know is that the artist was employed in 1584 at the court of the Duke of Bavaria, in Munich, that in 1585 he was (handsomely) paid by Rudolf II for executing the Getty oil version of the Hare, and that he subsequently moved to Prague in the service of the Emperor, helping him to assemble there the greatest collection of works by Dürer that the world has ever seen, many of them originating from the collection of Hoffmann’s recently deceased Nuremberg associate, Willibald Imhoff.
As for the provenance of the present work, although it cannot actually have been owned by Imhoff, who died two years before it was made, it is definitely recorded in the 1719 inventory of the collection formed by another celebrated early Nuremberg collector, Paulus Praun (1548-1616), who assembled an album containing more than 100 drawings by Hoffmann, and also owned notable works by Dürer.12 Since the Praun collection remained largely intact until it was purchased from his descendants by J. F. Frauenholz in 1801, and was carefully inventoried at various times, this step of the provenance is securely documented.13 From Praun’s collection, the drawing seems to have passed to the Viennese Imperial functionary Johann Melchior Birckenstock (1738-1809). It does not appear in the sales of Birckenstock’s collection, held in 1811-12, but presumably around that time it was acquired by another notable Vienna collector, Joseph Grünling.14 Passing from there by way of the Hartzen and Klugkist collections, it entered the collection of the Bremen Kunsthalle, where it remained from 1851 until 1945. In the last days of World War II, however, it was removed from the museum for safekeeping, and subsequently looted. The drawing resurfaced only several decades later, and was finally sold to the present owners at auction in Cologne in 2008, following an agreement made between the Kunsthalle and other interested parties that resolved all ownership issues.
In Hans Hoffman’s remarkable watercolour of a Hare, the innocent wild animal that Dürer first drew from life more than half a millennium ago lives on, a witness to centuries of European history, both political and artistic. The touching image remains relevant even to artists today; less than a decade ago, the Chinese artist Zheng Fanzhi made his own immense reinterpretation of Dürer’s Hare (fig. 5). But Hoffmann’s sumptuous and masterly watercolour is much more than an homage to one of the greatest works by one of the greatest draughtsmen. By reinterpreting the straightforward image of a simple, native animal in this much more courtly way, Hoffmann created not only a very beautiful work of art, but also encapsulated the tastes and interests of a unique moment in the art of central Europe.
1. Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 184; Koreny, op. cit., pp. 122-2, no. 37
2. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, inv. 1991.182.5; Koreny, op. cit., pp. 94-5, no. 27
3. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 1997.20; Koreny, op. cit., pp. 186-7, no. 65
4. Vienna, Albertina, inv. 3075; Strauss, op. cit., no. 1503/29; Koreny, op. cit., pp. 176-9, no. 61
5. Koreny, op. cit., pp. 56-63, 86-91, nos. 11-14, 23-25
6. Vienna, Albertina, inv. 3073 (D 49)
7. Koreny, op. cit., pp. 144-9, 154-7, nos. 47-49, 52-53
8. Koreny, op. cit., pp. 144-5, no. 47; sale, London, Christie's, 8 December 2015, lot 15
9. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, inv. 224; Koreny, op. cit., pp. 146-7, no. 48
10. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. 2001.12; Koreny, op. cit., pp. 148-9, no. 49
11. Koreny, op. cit., pp. 154-7, nos. 52-3
12. Achilles, loc. cit., and Achilles-Syndram, loc. cit.
13. We are most grateful to Dr. Szylvia Bodnár for her kind help in clarifying the early provenance, and for confirming that in her opinion the present work can definitely be identified in the 1719 Praun inventory, which makes it extremely unlikely that the drawing belonged to the Emperor Rudolf II, as was stated in the 2008 sale catalogue.
14. We are most grateful to Dr. Stephanie Sailer for kindly informing us that the present work is listed in an inventory of the Grünling collection, compiled in March and April 1822, in the archives of Joseph Heller, providing a terminus ante quem for the drawing's acquisition by Grünling