Meet one of Germany's first still-life painters, Hans Hoffmann. He started out imitating his predecessor Albrecht Dürer's watercolor drawings; his copies were so good that many were sold as Dürer originals. In 1585, Emperor Rudolf II named him court painter and he moved to Prague, about the time he created the painting seen here. The hare in this painting is based on Albrecht Dürer's famous and influential 1502 watercolor drawing "Young Hare," which depicts a live hare against a plain background. Hoffmann's hare differs from Dürer's as it appears amid a striking arrangement of elegant plants and insects, chewing on a leaf. Each plant and insect is seen in vivid detail. The finely wrought leaves of the thistle, the sprawling fronds of a plantain, and the bright blue flowers of the Hare Bell attest to Hoffmann's meticulous treatment of the subject. In fact, none of these plants coexisted in the natural world. Hoffmann imaginatively combined numerous individual nature studies in a sing...