Young Hare
after Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg 1471 – Nuremberg 1528)
Category
Art / Prints
Date
1502
Materials
Paper
Measurements
10.25 ins (h)9.25 ins (w)
Order this imageCollection
Shaw's Corner, Hertfordshire
NT 1274661
Summary
Coloured print of the “Young Hare” after Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg 1471 – Nuremberg 1528). The brown hare lies with paws to the front and ears pricked. "AD" monogram and date "1502" beneath.
Full description
Coloured print of the “Young Hare” after Albrecht Dürer. Bernard Shaw was a member of the Dürer Society, formed in 1897, whose aims were to reproduce the works of Albrecht Dürer (the German Renaissance painter and printmaker). Shaw shared this interest in Dürer with many Arts and Crafts practitioners, including William Morris. In his diary, Shaw described how he had ‘talked to Morris about Dürer before we went to bed’ when he stayed at Kelmscott Manor in the winter of 1892. (24 December 1892, see Stanley Weintraub, ed., Bernard Shaw The Diaries, 1885-1897, vol.2, p.883). A Shaw photographic self-portrait shows him leaning on the drawing-room mantelpiece at Shaw’s Corner in about 1910, where Dürer prints of the “Young Hare” and the “Little Owl” can be seen on the mantelpiece. (NT 1715217.38; and 1715256.59). (See Colin Eisler, Dürer’s Animals, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, for the Owl, Plate 9; and for the Hare, Plate 13). The Hare is now placed on the wall rather on than the mantelpiece, but the print of the Little Owl has not survived. Shaw was evidently fond of the image of the Young Hare, and sent it as a postcard to Clara Higgs (the Shaws’ housekeeper) in 1921 when he was requesting items of clothing to be sent to him at the Fabian Summer School in Godalming. (Allan Chappelow, Shaw the Villager, 60). The other remaining Dürer prints in the collection are Christ as the Man of Sorrows [frontispiece to] Small Passion, 1511; and Christ as the Man of Sorrows with Hands Bound, 1512. (Alice McEwan, 2020)
Provenance
The Shaw Collection. The house and contents were bequeathed to the National Trust by George Bernard Shaw in 1950, together with Shaw's photographic archive.
Makers and roles
after Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg 1471 – Nuremberg 1528), engraver (printmaker)