Dead Blue Roller (1583): Art, History and Details

Dead Blue Roller (1583) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Hans Hoffmann (German, 1545/50–1591/92); Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Half a century after the death of the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, his work continued to inspire artists and collectors. Hans Hoffmann was well known for his copies of Dürer’s nature studies, and in 1583 he faithfully copied Dürer’s celebrated drawing of a dead blue roller of 1512 in this exquisite watercolor. A network of very fine brushstrokes imitates the individual plumes of the bird’s underside while simultaneously suggesting an overall soft, downy texture. Several other copies of Dürer's composition exist, including one by Hoffmann in London. Both the London sheet and this sheet were signed with Hoffman’s prominent monogram and dated, indicating that he could not have intended them to pass as originals by the older master. Likely, he meant the drawing as an homage to the greatest German artist of the 1500s; his endeavor may have been sponsored by the Nuremberg-based Imhoff family, who owned Dürer's blue roller around the time this drawing was made.

Object facts

• Title: Dead Blue Roller
• Date: 1583
• Creator attribution: Hans Hoffmann (German, 1545/50–1591/92); Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor and gouache with touches of gold
• Dimensions: Sheet: 29.2 x 16.9 cm (11 1/2 x 6 5/8 in.); Secondary Support: 29.2 x 16.9 cm (11 1/2 x 6 5/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - German
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1946.217

A detail from the museum

This realistic portrait of a dead bird signals a turn toward objective depictions of nature in the 1500s.

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Weigel, J. A. G. Catalog einer Sammlung von Original-Handzeichnungen der deutschen, holländischen, flandrischen, italienischen, französischen, spanischen und englischen Schule. Leipzig: T.O. Weigel, 1869.
• Winkler, Friedrich. Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers. Berlin: Deutscher Verein für kunstwissenschaft, 1936.
• Francis, Henry S. "Drawing of a Dead Blue Jay by Hans Hoffmann." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art. 34, no. 1 (1947): 13-15.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.