Boys Rabbiting

Boys Rabbiting, held at Gallery Oldham, depicts young boys engaged in the rural pastime of rabbiting — hunting rabbits with ferrets, dogs, or traps — a subject that combines the Victorian interest in boyhood and outdoor freedom with a record of traditional English country practice. Millais was consistently drawn to subjects of boyhood and youth, finding in them both pictorial appeal and the opportunity to celebrate a quintessentially English experience of outdoor life. Boys with animals and in active outdoor pursuits had been popular subjects in British genre painting since the eighteenth century, drawing on a long tradition that valued the moral healthiness of outdoor country life over urban softness. Gallery Oldham, collecting for an industrial Lancashire community, would have found a subject about outdoor rural boyhood carrying particular appeal for an audience whose own children lived in an urban industrial environment very different from the countryside depicted.

The subject allowed Millais to paint boys in animated outdoor action, with the naturalistic rendering of dogs, ferrets, and the texture of grass and hedgerow that he did well in his later period. The paint handling is confident and broad, appropriate for an outdoor subject where atmosphere and movement matter more than fine detail. The colour is warm and naturalistic rather than idealized.