The Rabbit Hunt — About This Work
Pieter Bruegel, 1560
About the Work
The Rabbit Hunt is an unusually direct encounter with Pieter Bruegel as a printmaker. The Cleveland Museum of Art describes it as the artist's only autograph print, meaning a print he executed himself rather than one engraved after his design. Bruegel used a fine vocabulary of dots and flicked strokes to bring the etched surface close to the character of his pen-and-ink drawings.
At first the scene appears to be a broad landscape with a hunter aiming at rabbits in the foreground. Look more closely, however, and the balance shifts: a spear-bearing soldier is stalking the hunter himself. The reversal gives the image a darker edge and connects with a proverb Bruegel is known to have translated into visual form, in which the hunter may also become the hunted.
The landscape is as important as the incident. Bruegel uses the mountain, distant buildings and receding terrain to create a striking sense of depth and atmosphere. The result combines close observation of nature with the moral ambiguity found throughout his work: human beings move through a world they imagine they control, while forces beyond them remain active in the background.
The Work
Artist: Pieter Bruegel
Title: The Rabbit Hunt
Date: 1560
Medium: Etching on lightweight antique laid paper
Platemark: 22.1 × 29.0 cm
Sheet: 24.3 × 31.8 cm
Collection: Cleveland Museum of Art
Accession number: 2009.80
Print & Presentation
Palatine presentation: 30 × 40 cm landscape frame.
The complete image is reproduced at approximately 31.4 × 24.3 cm, without cropping or distortion. The surrounding white presentation area is incorporated into the print rather than added as a separate mount.
Frame finishes: Black, White or Natural.
Paper & glazing: Enhanced Matte + Perspex; Enhanced Matte + Moth-Eye.
Why Original Scale?
Most art-print shops offer the same image in a choice of Small, Medium and Large sizes. We take a different approach. For each edition, we begin with the recorded dimensions of the original work and reproduce the complete image at that scale, preserving its proportions and avoiding enlargement, reduction, cropping or distortion.
Source: Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access / CC0.
Care: Display in a dry interior away from prolonged direct sunlight and sources of moisture.
Notes from Palatine
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