Eagle Owl Attacking a Hare

Of the three von Wright painter brothers, Ferdinand was the only one to receive an actual art education. He studied at the school of the Stockholm Academy of Arts and was a private student of R.W. Ekman in Turku in the late 1840s. A short period of study in Dresden under the Norwegian animal painter Siegwald Dahl was significant for von Wright’s artistic development.

After his studies in Germany, von Wright turned to large-scale epic animal subjects, which he executed using the alla prima technique, favoured by the Dresden School, in which a small piece of the work was painted and completed in one session, from priming to surface finishing. This prevented the colour from later cracking, darkening and turning yellow.

Eagle Owl Attacking a Hare is one of the finest of Ferdinand von Wright works. The vivid painting is not merely a documentary work, but a compositionally enduring work of art. The artist painted the brutal encounter of the eagle owl and the hare twice, apparently at the same time, as the work in the Ateneum Art Museum differs from the Lahti work by only one blade of grass.