The Capture of a Swarm of Bees in a Farmyard
Jan van der Straet
1578–1605
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink and blue watercolor, with opaque white watercolor, over black chalk, on cream laid paper, incised with a stylus for transfer, laid down on cream laid paper
- Dimensions
- Primary support: 19.6 × 28 cm (7 3/4 × 11 1/16 in.); Secondary support: 21 × 29.1 cm (8 5/16 × 11 1/2 in.)
- Genre
- pen and ink drawings
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Tags
pen and ink drawingsprints and drawingpaperpaper (fiber product)
About
Primarily active in the court of Florence and patronized by the Medici, Johannes Stradanus designed tapestries depicting hunting, agriculture, and animal husbandry. Stradanus’s familiarity with these subjects is underscored in The Capture of a Swarm of Bees, in which he used remarkable precision to describe the removal of a beehive in the central foreground. His mastery of detail is especially evident in the protective headgear and clothing of the figures. A print based on this sheet forms part of a series of over 100 subjects illustrating various types of hunting and farm work.
