A Crab

About the Work

Jan van Huysum was famous above all for his flower compositions and landscapes featuring classical monuments and ruins. His study of a crab is in a category of its own; there is nothing else like it in his oeuvre. It thus defies precise dating. The artist may have modelled if after similar drawings from the circle of Albrecht Dürer or by Maria Sibylla Merian. His rendering of the crustacean’s surface texture is a masterwork of watercolour.