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.

If there’s one thing sure to put the fear of God into someone it’s a nearby bolt of lightning. One of the most understandable associations of lightning is thus with deities, particularly those who are as swift to anger and avenge as a sudden thunderstorm. In the myths of classical Greece and Rome, that could only mean Zeus or Jupiter, whose bundle of thunderbolts has even survived into computer technology.

Jan Cossiers’ impressive Jupiter and Lycaon from about 1640 shows Jupiter’s eagle vomiting thunderbolts at Lycaon, who is hurrying away as he is being transformed into a wolf, becoming the prototype for the werewolf of the future. These thunderbolts resemble arrows with shafts that zigzag like lightning in the sky, and are preserved today in the symbol used for Thunderbolt.

Tintoretto’s Jupiter and Semele (1545) shows an early moment in the myth of the mortal woman who was raped by the god, then destroyed by his thunderbolts when in late pregnancy. She reclines naked under a red tent. Jupiter has evidently just revealed himself, and rolls of cloud are rushing out from him. There are thunderbolt flames licking at Semele’s tent, and around the clouds surrounding Jupiter, but no sign of them touching Semele yet.

The myth of Philemon and Baucis also revolves around Jupiter visiting mortals, this time in innocuous human form and in company with Mercury. After the elderly couple have entertained the two gods, they go outside and ascend a mountain while the land below becomes flooded.

Peter Paul Rubens’ Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis (c 1625?) is a dramatic landscape with storm-clouds building over the hills, bolts of lightning, a raging torrent pouring down the mountainside, and the four figures on a track at the right. Philemon and Baucis are struggling up the track with their sticks, as they’re being taken to safety from the rising flood by Jupiter and Mercury.

Richard Wilson’s Destruction of Niobe’s Children from 1760 is a classical history-in-landscape, with a bolt of lightning in the centre far distance, a chiaroscuro sky, and rough sea below. Wilson shows this myth when Apollo is still killing Niobe’s sons. The god is at the top of a steep bank on the left, with Niobe among her children down below.

Nicolas Poussin’s setting of a Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) shows the city of Babylon in the distance, along a picturesque and pastoral valley. But the peacefulness of this landscape has been transformed by the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm: the gusty wind is already bending the trees, and near the centre of the view a large branch has broken with its force. Two bolts of lightning make their way to the hills below.

There’s frantic activity in response not only to the storm, but to a lioness attacking a horse, whose rider has fallen. An adjacent horseman is about to thrust his spear into the back of the lioness, while another, further ahead, is driving cattle away from the scene. Others on foot, and a fourth horseman, are scurrying away, driven by the combination of the lioness and the imminent storm.

In the foreground, Pyramus lies dying, his sword at his side, and his blood flowing freely on the ground, down to a small pond. Thisbe has just emerged from sheltering in the cave, has run past the bloodied shawl at the right, and is about to reach the body of her lover. She is clearly distraught.

The apocalyptic British painter John Martin told the semi-historical story of The Destruction of Tyre in this relatively small painting of 1840. Tyre was the great Phoenician port on the Mediterranean coast, claimed to have been the origin of navigation and sea trade. The prophet Ezekiel (chapter 26) foretold that one day, many nations would come against Tyre, would put the city under siege, break her walls down, that the fabric of the city would be cast into the sea, and it would never be rebuilt. Martin brings the forces of nature in to help destroy the port, with a storm great enough to sink many vessels, leaving their prows floating like sea monsters. In the distance is his standard lightning bolt.

Poussin used the great flood in Genesis as the underlying narrative in his late painting of Winter (c 1660-64), from his series of the four seasons. Lightning crackles through the sky as a few survivors try to escape the rising waters.

In Norse mythology it’s the god Thor who wields the thunderbolts. Mårten Eskil Winge’s painting of Thor’s Fight with the Giants (1872) shows this lesser-known battle in rich detail, including the two goats drawing the god’s chariot, and lightning bolts playing around his mighty hammer, the cause of thunder.

In Dante’s Inferno, when the author visits Hell with Virgil as his guide, there’s a lightning strike where souls are being ferried across to eternal torment. As the pair are trying to convince the ferryman Charon to take them both across, there is a violent gust of wind, a red bolt of lightning, and Dante becomes unconscious. This is shown in Alexander Litovchenko’s painting of Charon Carrying Souls Across the River Styx from 1861.

In John Martin’s 1820 painting of the witches scene from William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, three witches materialise from a swirl of mist and lightning bolts on the left, and Macbeth and Banquo appear surprised at their sudden arrival. Winding around the shores of the distant lake is the huge army, and Martin has turned the Scottish Highlands into rugged Alpine scenery as an indication of the much greater outcome of this meeting.

Tomorrow I’ll show a range of landscape paintings featuring lightning.