Aesop’s The Rooster and the Jewel

A cock, scratching the ground for something to eat, turned up a jewel that had once been dropped there. “Ho”, said he, “a fine thing you are, no doubt, and, had your owner found you, great would his joy have been. But for me, give me a single grain of corn before all the jewels in the world.”

This Aesop’s fable, though more popularly illustrated and told in medieval Europe, hit a cord in me. I find the theme very thought provoking and applicable to a modern audience. What one may find important, others may not. A modern ideal may be to find oneself surrounded by all one’s favorite things or pine for the things one wants, when the truth may be that those things that are truly needed are forgotten or overlooked. Even the cocky rooster on the dunghill seems to know that worth is not determined by how badly something is desired, but by how much it is needed.

The painting is purely watercolor painted with both wet and “drybrush” technique. It is one half of a diptych, the other being Aesop’s Lion and the Mouse. The two are meant to hang vertically with the Rooster on the left and the Lion on the right. The color schemes are purposefully linked.

Watercolor on Windsor Newton cold press (signed and numbered prints available)