Adriaen van de Venne
Today we present engraving with etching of two owls. They are pictured skating on ice, each in seventeenth-century dress and carrying a mouse attached to a string.
This print was copied from an engraving probably produced in the first years of the seventeenth century that shows the same pair of owls skating on a lake, with a windmill and a farmhouse in the background providing a distinctively Dutch context. The original composition is a painting by Adriaen van de Venne in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen that has the caption Hoe dienen wiy bij een! ('How well we go together'). In the painting the owl wearing the fur hat has spectacles tied to a string held in his beak, which in the prints have been replaced by a mouse. The print in this album eliminates all background detail to concentrate on the subject and the message related by the inscription along the bottom – that because times are now so corrupt, distinctions of rank or class are so unrecognisable that even owls are dressed as men. Given that owls were associated with the night and sinister activities, their representation in a human guise would have reinforced the disturbing implications.
Van de Venne was a specialist in proverbial and comic scenes and produced a large number of grisailles, most of which are peasant genre subjects.
Skating owls are not the only surprising animals in art - check here our selection of the famous lobsters!