Painters have used the owl in two ways. Some made it a symbol, a bird that carries a message. Others painted it for its own sake, as the subject of the picture.
Because the owl shuns daylight, Christian painters linked it to sin, the darkness of those who turn from God's light. As the bird of Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom, it also stood for learning. These twelve works span five centuries and three continents.
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How These Were Chosen
A work earns its place on this list in one of two ways. Either the bird fills the picture, or it carries a meaning on record, a symbol that people of the painter's own time knew and wrote about.
Only paintings count. Prints, images inked from carved blocks or plates and pulled in many copies, stayed out, even the famous ones. Two works below come close to that line: a scene by Jan Steen with a print on its wall, and a bird study by Audubon, painted by hand before it was engraved.
12. Tsuda Bensaku, Owl (1630s)
Tsuda Bensaku's Owl is a hanging scroll, a tall painting on paper made to hang on a wall and to be rolled up again for storage. In its lower half, a round owl sits on a thorny branch that curves toward the right.
Above the bird, columns of Japanese handwriting in flowing strokes run down the upper half of the sheet. At the far right edge, a small red square marks the paper. It is a seal, the stamp of an owner or an artist.
The Japanese painter Tsuda Bensaku made the scroll in the 1630s, in black ink and a few touches of color. Nothing shares the picture with the bird, only a muted, textured background now aged to tan, and fine brushstrokes build the feathers and pick out each thorn.
This owl carries no lesson. What Tsuda watched most closely is its gaze. The eyes are narrowed and turned down, and they never meet the viewer's, so the bird seems absorbed in itself, unlike the owls further down this list that stare straight out.
About Tsuda himself, little more than a name survives, written in Japanese characters as 津田弁作. His working life falls between the 1620s and the 1640s, and no birth or death dates are known.
Those decades open the Edo period, the long peace Japan knew from 1615 under the shoguns, the military rulers of the Tokugawa family.
Centuries later, the scroll reached Ohio through the art trade. The Cleveland Museum of Art bought it in 1988 from Leighton R. Longhi Inc., a New York dealer in Asian art.
Even there, the scroll has kept part of its secret. No one has yet transcribed the handwriting above the owl, the only words on the scroll.
At a Glance
Artist: Tsuda Bensaku (active 1620s to 1640s)
Painted: 1630s
Medium: Hanging scroll, ink and slight color on paper
Collection: Cleveland Museum of Art
About This Painting
How big is Tsuda Bensaku's Owl? Tsuda Bensaku's Owl measures 81 by 52.5 centimeters, about 31 7/8 by 20 11/16 inches. With its mounting, the scroll reaches 170.2 by 59.7 centimeters, about 67 by 23 1/2 inches.
What is the scroll's inventory number? Cleveland catalogs the owl as 1988.35. The purchase was made through the Kelvin Smith Fund.
Can I download an image of the owl? Yes. The Cleveland Museum of Art releases its photograph under CC0, a license that allows free reuse.
11. George Willison, James Boswell (1765)
An owl appears above the head of a young man in this portrait. The sitter is James Boswell, a Scottish diarist, later famous for his biography of the writer Samuel Johnson.
The Scottish painter George Willison made the portrait in Rome in 1765, in oil on canvas. It now belongs to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.
Boswell was then in his mid twenties, and his painter, born in 1741, was a year younger. Neither had come to Rome by chance, and the owl above Boswell's head hints at the life he was leading there.