German or Swiss school drawing

GERMAN or SWISS          circa 1525

A Pregnant Fox with an Apple in its Mouth.

Drawing in pen and brown ink, with touches of black ink.

This curious image must belong to the class of Emblemata,  images which elucidate proverbs or quotations from literary sources. In this case the meaning of our image may lie in Aristotle’s De Historia Animalium, in which the pregnant fox is proof against capture, and thus hides from the hunter. So the fox, her breasts and nipples very prominent, holds an apple in its mouth, perhaps as an indirect confirmation of its pregnancy.

Our drawing is both highly detailed and charged with vitality, especially in the musculature of the fox’s body. Although Virgil Solis (1514 -1562) had been suggested as the draftsman, the realism and physicality of the fox does not square with Solis’ calligraphic linear handling, and in fact should be dated perhaps a generation earlier than Solis’ working period, and closer to an artist like the Nuremberg artists of this period such as Barthel and Sebald Beham.

More recently an attribution to Urs Graf (c. 1485 Solothurn, Switzerland – 1527 or 1528 probably in Basel) has been tentatively suggested on the basis of a comparison with Country Dancers seen from the Front, signed with the artist’s monograph and dated 1525.

71 x 84 mm    2 13/16 x 3 5/16 inches

See Henkel & Schöne, Emblemata, Handbuch Zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI und XVII Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart and Weimar, 1967/96, p. 457.

Margarete Pfister-Burkhalter, Urs Graf Federzeichnung, Wiesbaden, no. 33, Turin Biblioteca Reale (GK Nr. 681).