Twelve works show what artists have done with rabbits and hares, from a Chinese funeral banner of the 2nd century BC to Albrecht Dürer's Young Hare of 1502 and a Peter Rabbit watercolor by Beatrix Potter of 1927.
The animal plays a part in a myth about stolen immortality, hangs as a trophy, sits in a child's arms and blows a horn in hell. Dürer's hare became a model that another German painter copied again and again.
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How These Were Chosen
A hare or a rabbit is small enough to be held, chased by a dog or carried home from the hunt, so it fits a legend, a portrait, a hunting scene or a kitchen wall.
Its fur is the hard part. Soft and full of shifting color, it tests a painter, and getting it right shows skill at a glance.
The list mixes the wild hare of the fields with the rabbit that could sit in a child's arms. Each work is here because the animal does a precise job in it.
It carries a legend or a joke, it is a pet, a trophy or a borrowed motif, or it is there to show off the painter's hand. The order climbs from a silk painting buried in a Chinese tomb to Dürer's Young Hare, number 1 and the best known of the twelve.
12. Unknown Han painter, Funeral Banner of Lady Dai (2nd century BC)
High on the left of a T-shaped silk banner, a rabbit leaps over the head of a toad standing on a crescent moon. An unknown Chinese painter made it in the 2nd century BC, under the Western Han dynasty, the line of emperors who then ruled China.
The silk came out of a grave. It was found in 1972 at Mawangdui, in the city of Changsha, in the tomb of Xin Zhui, known as Lady Dai, a noblewoman who died around 168 BC.
Its scenes are stacked from bottom to top, and the wide crossbar of the T is the sky. On the left of that sky sits the moon with its toad and rabbit. On the right, facing it, a red sun with a crow inside rises above eight smaller suns in the branches of a tree.
The two animals on the moon belong to the legend of Chang'e, a woman of Chinese myth. Long before, ten suns had risen together and scorched the earth. Her husband, the archer Yi, shot down nine of them.
As a reward, Yi obtained the elixir of immortality from the Queen Mother of the West, a goddess of Chinese myth. Chang'e ran off with the elixir and rose to the moon. On the banner she is usually identified as the woman riding the wing of a dragon toward the moon.
The theft had a price. In one version of the legend, Chang'e is turned into a toad as punishment, and the toad on the crescent may be her.
The rabbit has a task of its own up there. Chinese tradition placed a hare on the moon, pounding the herbs of immortality, and Han poets called it the Jade Hare. The painter caught it in mid-air, just above the toad.
At a Glance
Artist: Unknown painter of the Western Han dynasty, Chinese
Made: 2nd century BC
Medium: Mineral pigments on silk
Size: 205 cm high, 92 cm wide at the top (80.7 × 36.2 in)
Where to see it: Hunan Museum, Changsha, China
About This Banner
What is the meaning behind the funeral banner of Lady Dai?
The banner shows three realms stacked from bottom to top: the underworld, the human world and heaven. It was laid face down over the innermost of the four coffins, one inside the other, in which Lady Dai lay.
11. Chaïm Soutine, Le Lapin (1923 to 1924)
Down the full height of a narrow canvas hangs a rabbit, held by one leg, its fur still on and shading from brown to gold. Beside it, a red pitcher with a bulging, lopsided body dangles from its handle.
Chaïm Soutine, a painter born near Minsk who worked in France, painted the pair between 1923 and 1924. A dead animal strung up beside kitchen things was not his idea. He had found it in the work of an artist who had been dead for nearly a century and a half.