“The Little Owl”
“The Little Owl” is a beautiful watercolor painting embellished with gouache and pen on paper that dates to 1508. It was made by Albrecht Dürer, a German artist who lived in the late fifteenth to the early sixteenth century. An artist who worked in many mediums, Dürer was also an etcher, printmaker, mathematician and theorist. He is regarded as one of the most prominent artists of the Northern Renaissance.
Dürer completed several watercolor portraits of animals that were scientifically accurate, and some that were not so much (see his Rhinoceros woodcut). He made this piece during his most prolific period, after moving back to his home in Nuremberg after living and working in Venice for several years. The owl, which is a nocturnal animal associated with darkness, is drawn in a more objective manner.
Fond of the natural world, Dürer wrote, “Nature holds the beautiful, for the artist who has the insight to extract it. Thus, beauty lies even in humble, perhaps ugly things, and the ideal, which bypasses or improves on nature, may not be truly beautiful in the end.”
Dürer was one of the few people that was able to marry the art style of the Northern Renaissance with that of the Italian Renaissance and because of that, between 1512 and 1519, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I became Dürer’s foremost patron.
“The Little Owl” is part of the permanent collections of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria.
For more on Albrecht Dürer, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
