Right and Left

Winslow Homer

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Art

Right and Left (1909) depicts two common goldeneye ducks at the precise moment they are struck by a hunter's double-barreled shotgun blast, with a faint flash of red and a cloud of gray smoke barely visible at the horizon marking the shooter's distant canoe. The viewpoint is startlingly unconventional—placed at wave level, eye-to-eye with the falling birds against a gray, turbulent sea—drawing on influences from Japanese printmaking and popular hunting imagery. Winslow Homer (1836–1910), one of the foremost American Realist painters, spent the final decades of his career at his studio in Prouts Neck, Maine, where the rugged Atlantic coast shaped his mature vision of nature's elemental forces. Completed less than two years before his death, the painting operates simultaneously as a virtuosic sporting picture and a deeply felt meditation on mortality, widely regarded as one of the most powerful and innovative works in the history of American art.