The Lion and The Mouse - Artistic Interpretations

Artistic Interpretations

The fable has been a favourite with artists and sculptors. The Flemish painter Frans Snyders was responsible for at least two versions. One of these used to hang in the Great Hall at Westminster and was retouched by Winston Churchill so as to highlight the barely visible mouse. In 1973 the painting was restored and the overpainting removed; it now hangs in the Great Parlour of the Palace of Westminster.

In the 19th century the political cartoonist John Doyle adapted the fable to one of his monthly series of prints in February 1844. In it the mouse nibbling at the net is Earl Russell, who prevailed on the House of Lords to free the leonine Daniel O'Connell from the imprisonment he had incurred for trying to repeal the Irish Act Of Union. The fable was also the subject of a painting by the French artist Vincent Chevilliard (1841–1904) and exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1881. The Austrian artist Gustav Klimt incorporated a reference to the beginning of the story on the left hand side of his painting "The Fable" in 1883. There a lion sleeps beneath a shrub, on the leafless twigs of which mice are at play.

Illustrations of the fable also appeared on domestic objects, including a Chelsea plate in 1755 and a tile in the Minton Aesop's Fables series during the 1880s.

Sculptors turned to the fable in the 20th century. One of them was the maker of church furniture, Robert (Mouseman) Thompson, who came by his name for incorporating a mouse into most of his carvings. He did this legitimately in the Church of Our Lady and St Michael in Workington, Cumbria, where the underside of one of the seats in the choir stalls, installed in 1926, depicts the fable of the lion and the mouse.

A Marshall Fredericks statue of 1957 seeks to make the lion less threatening to children. The sculpture was commissioned for the Eastland Center in Harper Woods, Michigan. The lion is carved from limestone and has a large round head with stylized, uniformly coiled ringlets. Reclining on its back, it grins at the little mouse perched on its paw. This was cast from gilt bronze and gold plated, which led to its being stolen numerous times. One was returned 50 years after its theft and exhibited at the Detroit Historical Museum in 2007. A copy of the whole statue is on exhibition in the sculpture garden of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum.

Another American sculptor, Tom Otterness, has made the fable the subject of an equally child-friendly sculpture among the 23 he installed on the outdoor terrace of the seaside Beelden aan Zee museum in Scheveningen, The Netherlands, in 2004. In this the lion is lying trussed up on its side, contemplated by the mouse that stands upright with its hands clasped behind its back.

Among musical settings have been one published in New York by Mabel Wood Hill in her Aesop's Fables Interpreted Through Music (1920) and Werner Egk's Der Löwe und die Maus for small orchestra and children’s choir, performed in 1931. The fable also appears in Edward Hughes' Songs from Aesop's fables for children’s voices and piano (1965).