The Fox and the Stork

Did You Know?

• The fox invites the stork to eat with him and provides soup in a bowl, which the fox can lap up easily, but the stork cannot drink it with its beak.
• The stork then invites the fox to a meal served in a narrow-necked vessel, easy for the stork to access but impossible for the fox.

In art

People have been making art about this fable since the Middle Ages. One of the very first known examples is carved into a column top in the cloisters of the Collegiate church of Saint Ursus in Aosta, Italy. This 12th-century Romanesque carving shows both the fox's trick and the stork's trick on different sides of the column. A rare case in decorative arts is the Versailles labyrinth, built for Louis XIV to teach the Dauphin, which included both episodes among its 39 hydraulic statues. In the square of Barzy-sur-Marne, suggestive sculptures place the two animals at right angles, leaving the meal up to the viewer's imagination. Pieter Bruegel the Elder took a different approach in his 1559 painting Netherlandish Proverbs. The saying "The fox and the crane entertain each other" had come to mean that tricksters look out for themselves, so Bruegel put the two at the painting's center, each seated before their preferred container.

The fable's popularity really took off after it appeared in La Fontaine's Fables. After that, it showed up on all sorts of household items: buttons, firebacks, snuff graters, china, tiles, and wallpaper. Many artists have painted it, including Frans Snyders, Jan van Kessel the elder, Jean-Baptiste Oudry and his son Jacques-Charles, Hippolyte Lecomte, and Philippe Rousseau. Gustav Klimt included it on the right side of his 1883 painting "The Fable." There, the fox is with two storks, and one stork has a frog in its beak, a nod to the fable of The Frogs Who Desired a King. In Barcelona's Parc de la Ciutadella, a fountain sculpture by Catalan artist Eduard Batiste Alentorn shows the frustrated fox kicking over the tall vessel, with the fountain's water pouring out.

In the 20th century, the fable appeared on a medal in Jean Vernon's 1940 series illustrating La Fontaine, and Marc Chagall made it plate 9 in his 1952 etchings of the fables. Musically, Louis Lacombe wrote a piece about it (op. 72, 1875), and Andre Asriel used it as the first piece in his 1972 6 Fabeln nach Aesop. In 1995, composer Xavier Benguerel i Godó set it for recitation with orchestral accompaniment, one of seven fables he translated into Catalan for that work.