Fundevogel

Although the print relates to Fundevogel, the artist chose not to feature the story’s main characters: a girl, her foundling brother, and a cruel cook who threatens the siblings that he will put the boy in a large pot and boil him to death. The desolateness of the landscape contributes to the spooky atmosphere that dominates the print and defines the very mood of the Grimm fairy tale. In the story, the girl and the foundling run away and transform themselves into a series of objects in order to escape the cooks’ servants.

Similarly to the Cavafy prints, in which the artist experiments with the poem’s subject matter rather than faithfully represents it, the Grimm etchings do not illustrate specific events, but evoke a particular world, atmosphere or trope defining the narrative. Hockney commented in the context of Six Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, “I’d always enjoyed the fairy tales very much and thought I'd like to illustrate them, make a book rather like the Cavafy book, taking some of the stories; I'd read them all, about three hundred and fifty.“