Abstract
In 1858, American artist George Henry Hall completed A Dead Rabbit (Study of the Nude or Study of an Irishman), a stunning picture of a working-class Irish rioter. Directly engaging a subject—political violence—that contradicted the orderly imperatives of antebellum aesthetic and democratic theory, Hall undertook a project fraught with risk and difficulty. Reframing the midcentury rioter as an ideal nude, A Dead Rabbit seems both to temper and exacerbate the alarming connotations of violent upheaval. Marked by contradiction, the painting offers a unique lens on the broader conflicts and quiet ambivalences that complicated bourgeois responses to antebellum violence.
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