The Hare That Does Not Move

Hans Hoffmann was a German painter who worked in Nuremberg in the late sixteenth century. He is remembered primarily for one thing: he was very good at painting in the style of Albrecht Dürer, who had died sixty years before Hoffmann picked up a brush. This is not an insult. Dürer was the most technically accomplished artist in northern Europe, and painting in his manner was a legitimate artistic practice — part homage, part study, part continuation of a tradition that Dürer himself had inherited from others.

A Hare in the Forest, painted around 1585, is Hoffmann's most celebrated work. It depicts a brown hare sitting in a patch of forest floor — surrounded by grasses, wildflowers, a beetle, a stag beetle, a small blue butterfly. The hare is alert but still. Its ears are up. Its eye is dark and round and reflects a tiny point of light. The fur is rendered hair by hair. The grasses are rendered blade by blade. The painting is an exercise in the kind of attention that most people cannot sustain for more than a few seconds.

Dürer had painted his own famous hare — the Young Hare of 1502 — as an isolated study on a blank background. Hoffmann's contribution was to put the animal back into its world. The forest floor in his painting is not a backdrop. It is an ecosystem: layered, tangled, full of small lives happening simultaneously. The hare is the largest creature in the frame, but it is not the only one.