Deflection of narrative

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Franklin Kelly

Whether Homer painted Right and Left with his own death in mind cannot be said with certainty (he had, in 1895, predicted - nearly exactly, as it turned out - that he had fourteen years left to live).(27) But death is unquestionably and unavoidably its subject, and there can be no doubt that in this painting Homer wanted to put the viewer in the line of fire and bring him face to face with death. Two ducks have risen from the water attempting to escape the shots fired by the hunter in the distant boat.(28) One appears to fall (or turn) back toward the water while the other seems, for the moment at least, to continue its upward flight. Although the question of what will happen to the ducks has been much speculated upon in recent literature about Homer,(29) it is clear that we are witnessing what John Wilmerding has described as "the momentary and the universal, mortality illuminated by showing these creatures at the juncture of life and death."(30) In this last great work, Homer has yet again demonstrated that the most profound meanings lay not in concluding the narrative of a story but by showing viewers the very moment when difficult questions have been posed, but no easy answers have been provided.

This essay is based on material in Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly's Winslow Homer, published recently by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. It accompanies a traveling exhibition of the same title on view until January 28, 1996, at the National Gallery of Art. Future showings will be listed in Calendar.

1 Homer to M. Knoedler and Company, February 19, 1902 (typescript in the library of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).

2 Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York, 1969), p. 187.

3 Roger B. Stein, Seascape and the American Imagination (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 1975), p. 112. More recently, Stein has classed The Gulf Stream among "the great masterpieces of Homer's maturity," although he observed that the painting does "seem to call for some narrative closure. The viewer's demand was a legitimate one" ("Picture and Text: The Literary World of Winslow Homer," in Winslow Homer: A Symposium, ed. Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. [Washington, D.C., 1990], pp. 55-56, n. 9).

4 See Stein, "Picture and Text" for a helpful discussion of Homer's uses of narrative in his graphic works.

5 See, for example, The War for the Union, 1862 - A Cavalry Charge, which appeared in Harper's Weekly on July 5, 1862 (pp. 424-425).

6 "Topics of the time. The Centennial," Scribner's Monthly, vol. 11 (January 1876), p. 432.

7 New-York Tribune, January 11, 1876.

8 "Fine Arts. The National Academy Exhibition, II," The Nation, vol. 22 (April 20, 1876), p. 268.

9 Springfield Daily Republican, February 17, 1880.

10 The letter is in the curatorial flies of the Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts.

11 Boston Daily Evening Transcript, February 25, 1886.

12 George Brown Goode, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1887), vol. 1, p. 123.