Toddler with White Rabbit, American Backyard, 1950s

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Toddler with White Rabbit, American Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Toddler with White Rabbit, American Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-A3A14B

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Sometime in the 1950s, a very small, very blond child crouched in the clover-dotted grass of an American backyard and made the discovery that a live rabbit does not cooperate the way a stuffed one does. The concentration is total — head down, both hands occupied — and there is every sign that the rabbit has different plans.

Keeping a backyard rabbit was exactly the kind of wholesome, character-building project that postwar suburban parents endorsed on the theory that responsibility toward a small animal would translate into responsibility toward everything else. It translated, mostly, into scenes like this one.

A second child lingers at the edge of the yard, already holding something — apparently the rabbit-wrangling had an audience from the start. The white clapboard house behind them is the standard mid-century American vernacular, the kind that went up by the hundreds of thousands between 1945 and 1960, each one with a yard just large enough for exactly this kind of afternoon.

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