Tan Lines VII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

The March Hare of Wonderland

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. “Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,” thought Alice; “only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”

The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.

“There’s PLENTY of room!” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.


“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.

“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.

“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare.


– Excerpted from Chapter 7 of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Image 1: Gwynedd M. Hudson, 1922.
Image 2: Arthur Rackham, 1907.
Image 3: Sir John Tenniel, 1865.

The Hare on the Bookshelf

Image: The Hare by Jill Mason on the Leveret’s bookshelf - November 2008.

Morning Light XVI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Hare in a Forest

“A Hare in the Forest”
by Hans Hoffman
German, about 1585
Oil on panel

Following is how the Getty Center in Los Angeles describes Hoffman’s “A Hare in the Forest.”

“Nibbling on a leaf pulled from a stalk of Lady’s Mantle, an alert hare sits at the edge of a pine forest. Unlike the darkness one would expect to find in a forest, Hans Hoffmann painted a theatrically illuminated scene. Each plant and insect – snail, cricket, beetle – is seen in vivid detail. The finely wrought leaves of the thistle, the sprawling fronds of a plantain, and the bright blue flowers of the Hare Bell attest to Hoffmann’s meticulous treatment of the subject. In fact, none of these plants could have co-existed in the natural world. Hoffmann imaginatively combined numerous individual nature studies in a single painting.

“Hoffmann’s golden-brown hare is based on Albrecht Dürer’s famous and influential watercolor which, much like his Stag Beetle, shows a hare against a plain ground. Hoffmann had seen Dürer’s hare while in Nuremburg. Later, when he went to work in the court of Emperor Rudolf II, he helped the Emperor acquire the watercolor for his Kunstkammer. Hoffmann’s hare differs from Dürer’s however, appearing amid a striking arrangement of elegant plants and insects. At the time it was painted, this arrangement of nearly life-size subjects was entirely unique, not only within Hoffmann’s body of work, but also within the tradition of German nature study.”

Autumn Beauty

Dressed in nothing more then a leaf, Randy Corona turns into the embodiment of the ever changing nature. But instead of preparing for winter, Randy turns into a blossoming branch with colorful leafs, maturing into a trunk and finally taking solid root. . . . Together with [body painter] Ricardo Muñiz, Randy Corona creates his own Garden of Eden in Central Park.

– Source

Images: Randy Corona.

Antipathy

Hares and rabbits do not fraternize. Hares feed on almost every kind of vegetation, even seaweed, mushrooms, puffballs, and the leaves of young conifers, but they will not graze on land used by rabbits. It is said that rabbits drive them off pugnaciously, but even when there are no rabbits about they will not feed there because rabbits make the grass seem foul for them, as it is for sheep, and as a pasture is for cattle after geese have been on it.

Charles Welling has seen ghastly evidence of antipathy: “What used to destroy most hares was rabbits. The buck rabbit used to go and bite the top of their heads when they found them. Of the leveret. Of the young. When you go – you find the form with three or two in it. But going back an jour later – you’d see the heads all smashed and eaten. You’d stand back and say, ‘Well, what’s done that?’ – and you’d suddenly see a buck rabbit come or a doe rabbit come, jumping out and go around and scratch them out of the nest after they’d killed them. So we’d know that that’s what they’d done.”

– Excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson (Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 26-27.


Image: “Brown Hare Alerted” - Chatton Gallery.

Tan Lines VI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Sleeping Hare

Image: Curled Hare Brooch (pewter with a silver colored finish) by Sapphire Moon.

Morning Light XV

Subject: Rafael Branciforti. Photographer: Unknown.