Two ducks cross the canvas. One, wings spread, still seems to be flying; the other is already tumbling, head down, struck in mid-flight. Below them, a gray, choppy sea. In the distance, almost invisible among the waves, a boat in which a hunter has just fired. And we, the viewers, are placed at the height of the birds, squarely in the path of the shot.
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Right and Left, painted in 1909, is one of Winslow Homer’s last great paintings. He finished it less than two years before his death, in his studio at Prouts Neck on the Maine coast. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which has owned it since 1951, sees it as a summation of the creative complexity of his late style: a sporting picture, but also a meditation on life and death.
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Above all, it is a work of rare daring for a painter past seventy. Tight framing, an impossible point of view, motion frozen at the decisive instant: few American paintings of the time dared as much.
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By 1909 Homer had lived at Prouts Neck for more than twenty-five years. He now spent much of the year there, alone in his studio facing the Atlantic, keeping visitors at arm’s length.
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In May 1908 he had suffered a mild stroke. According to Smithsonian Magazine, he recovered quickly and even joked about it, describing himself as having “one eye in the pot and one eye in the chimney.” Within months he was back at work.
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The subject came from his immediate surroundings. According to the National Gallery of Art, Homer may have watched hunters shooting sea ducks from boats off Prouts Neck. It was a world he knew well: for years he had been going to the woods of the Adirondacks and Quebec with gun or fishing rod in hand.
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The birds are common goldeneyes, diving ducks seen along the New England coast in winter. That is, in fact, how Homer’s dealer first described the painting, before it received its title.
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The title is a hunting term. A “right and left” means bringing down two birds in quick succession with the two barrels of a shotgun. The painting captures exactly that moment: the first bird is hit, the second is about to be, or just has been.
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Homer built the composition around this double movement. The two ducks fill almost the entire canvas, one above the other, in a diagonal tension that conveys a sense of falling. One is still rising, the other plunging. Between them lies only a fraction of a second, the one that separates life from death.
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La mer, \u00e0 l’arri\u00e8re-plan, est trait\u00e9e en larges masses de gris et de blanc. Elle sert de fond, presque de surface abstraite, contre laquelle se d\u00e9tachent les silhouettes des oiseaux. Le chasseur, lui, est \u00e0 peine perceptible : un \u00e9clair de tir, une silhouette dans une barque, au milieu des vagues. Il n’est pas le sujet : il est la cause. <\/p>\n\n
This reduction of narrative to a single instant, a single gesture, is typical of Homer’s last years. As in his great seascapes without figures, he strips away anecdote to keep only the essential confrontation \u2014 here between animal and death.
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What makes Right and Left so arresting is where it places the viewer.
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We are neither in the boat with the hunter nor on the shore. We are in the air, at the height of the birds, and directly in the line of fire. This point of view, which no one could occupy in reality, creates an immediate unease: whoever looks at the painting is both witness and target.
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The National Gallery of Art connects this framing to two very different sources. On one side, Japanese prints, with their tight compositions, simplified backgrounds and figures cut off by the edge, which Western artists had been collecting for decades. On the other, the popular hunting imagery widespread in the America of the day: prints, calendars, illustrations in sporting magazines.
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Homer transformed its meaning completely. Where sporting pictures celebrated the hunter’s skill, Right and Left places the emotion on the side of the birds.
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In December 1908 Homer wrote to his brother Charles: “I am painting when it is light enough, on a most surprising picture.” The letter, quoted by Smithsonian Magazine, does not name the subject, but the timing fits: the following month, in January 1909, Right and Left was consigned to the New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co.
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The origin of the title belongs to anecdote. William Howe Downes, Homer’s first biographer, in a book published in 1911, reports that the picture still had no name when it was shown, and that a visitor with a taste for hunting, recognizing the double shot at a glance, supplied it. The story cannot be verified, but it suits a painter who hated explaining his work.
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The painting sold that summer. According to the National Gallery of Art, it had been bought by August 3, 1909, by Randal Morgan, a businessman from Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. It remained in his family until 1950, when it returned to Knoedler, and was purchased by the National Gallery of Art on July 11, 1951, as a gift of the Avalon Foundation. Homer died at Prouts Neck on September 29, 1910.
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It is hard not to read Right and Left in the light of its author’s approaching death. The historian John Wilmerding, a leading Homer scholar, saw in it a depiction of mortality caught at the exact point of passage between life and death.
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Le tableau rassemble en effet bien des th\u00e8mes de l’\u0153uvre de Homer : la mer, la nature sauvage, la chasse, l’indiff\u00e9rence du monde naturel. Mais il les pousse \u00e0 leur point extr\u00eame. Il n’y a plus de figure humaine \u00e0 laquelle s’identifier, plus de r\u00e9cit \u00e0 suivre. Il n’y a que deux oiseaux et un coup de feu. <\/p>\n\n
And yet nothing in it feels like a farewell. The brushwork is lively, the composition daring, the light cold and exact. The painter who, a few months earlier, had been joking about his own stroke produced here one of the most modern pictures of his career.
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The painting has belonged to the Washington museum since 1951 and hangs in the American galleries of the West Building, on the National Mall side. Installations change from time to time, so it is worth checking that it is on view before you go.
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The canvas measures 28 1\/4 by 48 3\/8 inches (71.8 \u00d7 122.9 cm). Admission is free, and the museum offers a high-resolution reproduction that can be downloaded freely from the artwork’s record.
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