Rabbits

Rabbits is an undated canvas by George Morland held at the Dundee Art Galleries and Museums, representing the specialised animal painting that formed a significant strand of his prodigious output alongside horses, pigs, and other domestic and farmyard animals. Morland's ability to render small animals with sympathetic accuracy — their characteristic postures, the texture of fur, the specific quality of their alertness or repose — was noted by contemporaries and contributed to his popularity with engravers who reproduced his works for a broad market. Dundee's collection, one of Scotland's most significant civic art holdings, includes British paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflecting the collecting ambitions of a prosperous maritime and industrial city. Rabbits occupy an interesting place in the visual culture of late eighteenth-century Britain: simultaneously domestic pets, farm animals, hunting quarry, and symbols of fecundity, they appear across genres from the still life to the sporting painting and the domestic genre scene.

Small animal painting at close range required Morland to work at a different scale than his farmyard panoramas, with correspondingly different technical demands. Fur texture — soft, layered, with highlights indicating the individual hairs' direction — requires a fine, flexible brushwork quite different from the broad strokes of landscape. The composition likely shows the rabbits in a natural setting — a burrow entrance, a kitchen garden, a stable corner — that provides context without overwhelming the principal subjects.