Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence

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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Notes on contributors

Ross Barrett

Ross Barrett is assistant professor and David G. Frey Fellow of American Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is currently preparing a book-length manuscript on the representation of political violence in nineteenth-century American painting [Department of Art, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 115 South Columbia Street, CB no. 3405, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599, [email protected]].