Tavle med Ugle flyvende med hare, derunder; hunde, hare og jagtfalk 1765 - 1833

Curator: Oh, this print—there’s such an uncanny theatricality about it. Editor: Absolutely, a dramatic collision of forces, wouldn't you say? Let's start by acknowledging the work itself. It’s entitled "Tavle med Ugle flyvende med hare, derunder; hunde, hare og jagtfalk," which translates to something like "Panel with Owl flying with hare, below; dogs, hare and hunting falcon.” Gerhard Ludvig Lahde made it sometime between 1765 and 1833. It's an engraving, currently housed at the SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark. Curator: A nightmarish nursery rhyme gone wrong. I’m fixated on that owl—those eyes, like gleaming, judgmental moons—ferrying its limp prize against a theatrically cloudy sky. A hare, right? A terrified, fluffy dinner. The detail is incredible; you can practically feel the poor thing’s weightlessness in its captor’s grip. And that little moon adding to the melodrama. Editor: The artist captures a clear hierarchy there: dominance and vulnerability played out across land and sky, yes? If you shift your attention to the lower half of the print, the earthbound chase, things become clearer. It looks like a failed hunt with both dogs and a falcon involved. Note how each grouping represents the relationship of hunter and prey. What might that comment on the human relation to the world we co-inhabit? Curator: Failed hunt...hmm, but still a rather bloodthirsty tableau. All teeth and claws and desperate leaps, all creatures great and small, bound by primal struggle. I can't help but think of my old cat and her obsession with anything that dared move within a ten-mile radius of our backyard. She thought she was a miniature lion. Editor: Right. We read it as a very natural scene but forget the cost. But isn't it fascinating how Lahde creates separate spaces on the paper to convey different stages of this hunt? It allows him to juxtapose aerial predation with the ground chase. Curator: Yes! The composition adds to that fairy-tale horror, right? Lahde sets them up like separate acts in a play, and they seem to feed into this… inescapable, unsettling whole. Makes one grateful for tea and biscuits, doesn't it? Editor: It really invites questions about our place in this hierarchy and about human involvement in nature's theatre. What happens when those relationships get disturbed? Curator: A beautiful little memento mori—a tiny, gothic reminder of where we all stand on the food chain. Cheerful stuff. Editor: Indeed. Perhaps a meditation on how every moment of life is entwined with both survival and precarity. Thanks for walking through that with me.