As today is the first day of April, it’s a double danger: as the first of the month you should say rabbit or white rabbit when you first wake up, and it’s All Fools’ Day as well. I have no hoaxes for you this year, I promise, but I do have rabbits, some of them white, and a few hares as well. Rabbits and hares are relatively infrequent in paintings, and where they do occur they seldom have any deeper reading.

Because they’re so familiar, they appear in animal gatherings.

In the left panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c 1495-1505) is a curious mixture of real and imaginary creatures. There’s an elephant and a giraffe, both early depictions of those species, together with monkeys, brown bears, rabbits, and more, even a white unicorn drinking at the lake on the left.

Among the many superb animal paintings of Paulus Potter, Orpheus and Animals from 1650 is one of his most unusual, showing a wide range of different animal species, some of which weren’t well-known at that time, and one of which (the unicorn) didn’t even exist. Those seen include a Bactrian camel (two humps), donkey, cattle, ox, wild pig, sheep, dog, goat, rabbit, lions, dromedary (one hump), horse, elephant, snake, deer, unicorn, lizard, wolf, and monkey.

In Tintoretto’s Creation of the Animals, the first of his Old Testament cycle for the Scuola della Trinità in Venice, God flies along as he creates pairs of different species of bird, fish, and animal, from cormorants to rabbits.

Among their leading roles is in Elihu Vedder’s delightful painting of the unfortunate Marsyas.

Late in 1877, Carrie Vedder, the artist’s wife, recorded in a letter that her husband had been thinking about Marsyas, and considered that, before the contest with Apollo, Marsyas must have proved his skill with the aulos. He therefore came up with the idea that this must have at least been charming hares with the instrument. He started this painting early in 1878, setting it in the New England winter. This was shipped to Paris for show at the Exposition Universelle later that year, but Vedder was disappointed that it didn’t do well there.

The hare is known from fable for its speed, although not so much when racing against a tortoise.

At some time during the first half of the seventeenth century, Frans Snyders painted the still popular Fable of the Hare and the Tortoise. The tortoise and the hare disputed which of the two was the faster, so agreed to run a race against one another. Although the hare was much faster when running, he laid down beside the path and slept. The tortoise, being aware of his relative slowness, ran as fast as he could, past the sleeping hare, until he won. Snyders shows the hare at full pelt, and the tortoise crawling away in the distance, giving little clue as to the surprising outcome or its cause.

JMW Turner alludes to this fable in his Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway from 1844.

Running ahead of this very early steam locomotive as it crosses the River Thames at Maidenhead is a hare, barely visible at the lower right.

Perhaps the most famous painted hare appears in one of Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour masterpieces, dated to 1502.

Following this tradition, one of Bruno Liljefors’ favourite species was the elusive hare. This page of Hare Studies from 1885 shows a tiny part of the image library he assembled, as well as their spring antics.

Unlike the common rabbit, some hares become white for the winter. This is one of the many paintings that Liljefors made of a Winter Hare, here from 1910.

Both hares and rabbits have been traditional meats, and there are several still life and hunting paintings depicting them dead and being prepared for a meal.

Several of Chardin’s small output of about 200 paintings included hanging game, here an undated Rabbit and Copper Pot, elsewhere hares and others.

The rise of the sciences during the nineteenth century didn’t spare rabbits from being used in physiological experiments.

Following the death of the physiologist Claude Bernard, the Sorbonne (where he had taught) commissioned Léon Lhermitte to paint his portrait in 1886. Sadly I’ve been unable to trace an image of the original, but Claude Bernard and His Pupils is a faithful copy of the painting that Lhermitte exhibited at the Salon in 1889. This shows Bernard in the midst of performing an experiment on a rabbit, his students discussing its results, and one writing the experimental observations in the laboratory daybook.

Rabbits have been favourites with children, and kept as domestic pets. From there they appear in some of the most surprising places.

Johann Eleazar Zeissig shows A Family Making Chinese Shadows in his painting from the late 1700s. A family are entertaining themselves late in the evening with the aid of a lamp as a point source of light. An older boy is tracing the silhouette of his mother on a sheet of paper which he holds on the wall behind her. At the upper right are examples of his ‘shadowgraph’ drawings. Three younger children are holding up their hands to form the silhouettes of a rabbit and a cat, clichés of childhood.

August Macke’s Little Walter’s Toys from 1912 includes two of the favourite family pets, a rabbit and guinea pig.

My last guest appearance of a white rabbit is the most curious of all.

JMW Turner painted this narrative landscape of The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl in 1823. Apollo is on the left, with his lyre, and the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She’s holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains. Opposite the couple, on the other side of the path, under the trees, is a white rabbit.

Maybe it was just the first day of the month.