The Bird in Borrowed Feathers

[5] Such stories addressed themselves to various kinds of pride and had given rise to the Latin idiomatic phrase esopus graculus (Aesop's jackdaw) that Erasmus recorded in his Adagia.

[8] When Jean de la Fontaine adapted the story in his Fables Choisies (IV.9), it was the Latin version of a bird disguised as a peacock that he chose, but he followed Horace in applying it to 'The human jay: the shameless plagiarist'.

[12] Among Russian variants of the fable, Alexander Sumarokov's featured a kite in 1760, comparing it to a lowly person who has managed to enrich himself with bribes and is now holding himself as equal to nobility.

While keeping close to the fable at the start, Krylov ends by extending the application to the human example of a merchant's daughter marrying a noble and fitting neither with his family nor her own.

[13] In the 17th century, when paintings were popular home decorations but had to be justified by carrying a moral message, the Dutch artist Melchior d'Hondecoeter executed at least two of the Greek version of the fable in which many species of bird attack the daw.

[15] English artists who have been influenced by their treatment of the subject include George Lance, whose "The vain jackdaw stripped of his borrowed plumes" was highly praised when he exhibited it at the British Institution in 1828.

Many illustrations of La Fontaine's fables follow similar themes,[18] including Kano Tomo-nobou's Japanese woodcut version published from Tokyo in 1894.