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Lunar Hare
Mounted pin-brooch, 2007 aterials: 20ct gold, black mother-of-pearl, yellow sapphire, silver, 18ct white gold pin
height (without pin): 30mm width: 28mm ount: mixed media Signed and dated on back of book artist’s no: 418.MP-B.07 hidden alche y: 214-6
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It is Dürer, surely, who has made the definitive visual statement of Hare, in his iconic drawing from 1502; just as, if not the last word, then certainly some of the best lines have been written by Arto Paasilinna in his magical novel, The Year of the Hare.
Behaviourally, it is the strangest of creatures, ruled by energies and tuned to forces with which we ourselves have perhaps now lost touch, and it may well be this spirit of unpredictability which has, in folklore, connected it with the moon and with feminine principals such as Venus; and in the Virgin Mary, with both.
The Wallace Collection contains within its paintings numerous images of the Hare, but I think I am right when I say that, without exception, they are of dead (actually killed) hares. This is explained by the social significance and status of hunting as a privileged pastime, the commissioning of sumptuous ‘still lifes’ featuring game being a lasting, stage-managed display of such pursuits – to quote the Fourth Marquess, adding to his collection of such canvases, ‘...beautiful of the sort & perfect for my shooting place’*. Of all these paintings, Van der Helst’s Family Group [P110] is for me the most strange, the most disturbing, partly because it returns the Hare – a beautiful but dead and bloody creature – to the Feminine Principal, not here Venus or the Virgin Mary and not the moon, but literally into the hands of Gerrit Schouten’s wife, Geertruid, across whose virginally white silks the sinister shadow of the kill falls. There is more here than first meets the eye.
My hare, however, is safe and living, yellow-eyed, still in the arms – or horns – of the feminine: his energy I have turned to wheel-walking the young crescent of the moon across a March sky.
* Letter from the 4th Marquess of Hertford to his agent Samuel Mawson, Paris, 28th April 1857
