The Wren and the Bear (1902): Art, History and Details

The Wren and the Bear (1902) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Arthur Rackham (British, 1867–1939).

The work and its context

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

The battle depicted here between flying and land animals is from the fairy tale “The Wren and the Bear.” The bear insults the wren, the king of the birds, leading to a war. Most of Arthur Rackham’s best-known illustrations combine intricate line work with delicate coloring. However, he also produced some silhouette illustrations like this one, created for a luxury edition of Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. The illustration won a gold medal at the 1906 Milan International Exhibition, where it was exhibited as The Battle between the Air and the Earth.

Object facts

• Title: The Wren and the Bear
• Date: 1902
• Creator attribution: Arthur Rackham (British, 1867–1939)
• Culture: England, early 20th Century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: brush and black ink and pen and black ink, with watercolor, on paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 36.7 x 25.8 cm (14 7/16 x 10 3/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1946.8

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Ralph Perkins in memory of Coburn Haskell

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry. "Recent Accessions to the Museum Collections." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 33, no. 9 (November 1946): 167-168.

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.