The Rabbit Man: The Art of Harrison Cady

Abstract

A minor-key tragedy of American artists, it seems to me, is that which visits, at times, the most proteanly dexterous, the most joyously volatile—those who find themselves somehow diverted, or discouraged, or lulled into some particular cove or inlet of their art, with which their audiences often identify them, exclusively, forevermore. Such becalming, I think, befell one of American art's trimmest and most adroitly navigated vessels: the talent of Harrison Cady, who, for close to five decades, until his death on December 10, 1970, was crowned by generations of readers with the floppy ears and pink-nosed countenance—beaming or winsomely staring—of Peter Rabbit; who, to triply seal the charm, was the transatlantic conversion, sea-changed but recognizable, of Beatrix Potter's cabbage-pillaging picaro—a suburban cousin of the more footloose and dreamily sententious Peter of Thornton W. Burgess' Mother Nature volumes. This third Peter, Cady's whimsical avatar, was, of course, the Peter Rabbit of the New York Tribune's (later, the Herald Tribune's) Sunday comic pages, from August 15, 1920, until July 25, 1948: a tenure that seemed, indeed, to harden even as the initial comic brio and adventurous friskiness drained way into the kind of inane, half-desultory mechanics which can nevertheless delight small children (as shrewdly economical as sparrows in finding their pleasures) but which, for Cady admirers, was the rather saddening sunset streak lingering from his early career's lusty radiance. It was a career, not of the most copiously imaginative, the most originally perceptive or charm-laden of artists, but that of a richly articulate and jovially inventive artist, the kind who, as he needs the oxygen he breathes, needs to circulate and traffic in the widest of worlds possible because his converse with such a world, the tapestry of his daily notations, is the content of his art, and its savour.