Dead Rabbit

This painting is meant to represent a member of the notorious New York Irish-American street gang known as the Dead Rabbits. In the 1850s the gang achieved renown for their prowess as thieves, burglars, pickpockets, and thugs. In riots their emblem was a dead rabbit impaled on a spike. In July 1857 their street battle with their rival gang the Bowery Boys in the Five Points District of lower Manhattan cast a national spotlight on urban gangs. The American social historian Joshua Brown has recently remarked that Hall’s painting “offers us an entrée . . . into the [mid-19th century] native-born, middle-class perception of the immigrant working class. Rendered shortly after the 1857 riot, [the painting] depicts a mutton-chopped young man naked to the waist, cradling a brick in one hand while caught in a state of uncharacteristic repose, a distant, come-hither expression on his upturned face. The painting starkly conveys the fear and fascination that fueled the class and ethnic conflicts of an era in a way that no other piece of antebellum evidence I have come across does. ”Hall presented this painting in 1882 as a substitute for his original diploma work, an unidentified fruit still life that the National Academy Council had accepted in 1868. His reason for replacing it with A Dead Rabbit is not known, but it may reflect a desire to be represented at the Academy as a painter of figures — the highest form of artistic expression, according to academic tradition.