About this work
*Panel for a Screen: Children Playing with a Rabbit* dates to around 1876 and is executed in oil on gilded leather mounted on canvas, measuring approximately 38½ by 20¼ inches — a tall, narrow vertical format well suited to its origins as a decorative panel. In this scene, young children are shown in gentle, animated communion with a rabbit, the figures rendered with the soft, rounded simplicity that defines Ryder's early pastoral sensibility. A layer of gold beneath the image shines through the translucent colors to create a rich, luminous finish — warm ambers and earthy greens suffused with an otherworldly inner glow. The elongated proportions and contained, intimate composition draw the eye slowly downward through the figures, evoking a quiet, enchanted moment suspended in time.
During the 1870s and 1880s, Ryder became friends with the art dealer Daniel Cottier, who commissioned him to paint several leather panels as decorations for furniture. These three panels for a folding screen tell the story of Genevieve of Brabant — a medieval heroine wrongfully expelled from her home and abandoned in a forest, where her young child was nursed by a doe.
Ryder frequently returned to the theme of naive innocence to express his romantic view of women. This panel predates his celebrated allegorical and operatic works of the 1880s and 1890s, placing it in a formative moment when his instinct for myth and feeling was first finding its decorative voice. The work is held in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gifted by John Gellatly.
As wall art, this piece rewards intimate spaces — a study, a narrow hallway, or a reading room where its vertical format commands attention without overwhelming. The gilded ground gives it a warmth that shifts subtly with changing light, making it feel alive rather than static. It speaks to a viewer drawn to art that carries a story beneath the surface — where childhood and wilderness, innocence and myth, exist in quiet proximity. There is nothing sentimental about it; the feeling it generates is closer to reverie, a pause on the threshold of something older and stranger than the image itself first suggests.
