About this work
The drama arrives in an instant. Homer's only watercolor to show a deer being killed, this work captures the moment the stag is shot, just as he climbs to the top of a rock in a river of rushing water. The viewer is thrust into the scene mid-action — the animal's effort and vulnerability made undeniable by its precarious, exposed position. The black silhouettes of two animals, either more deer or dogs, recede into the distance on the right, while a white puff of gun smoke drifts along the far bank to the left.
Removed spatially and emotionally from the hunter, we focus entirely on the prey.
The forested background is painted broadly in tones of earthy green, tan, and smoky blue, the looseness of Homer's watercolor hand giving the wilderness a living, atmospheric weight that a tighter medium could never achieve.
Dated 1892, the work is a watercolor on paper measuring 38.2 × 54.5 cm, and now resides in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It belongs to one of the most concentrated creative bursts of Homer's career. Almost every season from 1889 through 1894 saw the creation of many watercolors picturing the beauties of this unspoiled region — the forest, the mountains, the lakes and streams, the wildlife, and the native guides, hunters and fishermen.
Homer found particular inspiration in summer trips to the North Woods Club, near the hamlet of Minerva, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains.
Between the years of 1889 and 1892, deer hunting was a recurrent theme in his paintings, and *A Good Shot* stands as the most unflinching entry in that series — the one work where the outcome is not implied but shown. When Homer brought his comprehension of the natural world as a place of never-ending contests for survival to the Adirondacks, he expressed it in a variety of ways, subtle as well as dramatic. This is the dramatic.
On a wall, the painting asks to be met on its own terms. Its horizontal sweep and the stillness that surrounds the central action give it a cinematic quality that rewards a long look from across a room — a study, a great room with natural light, or any space where the outdoors feels close. This series of Adirondack watercolors marked a new step in Homer's artistic development; his watercolors had always been in advance of his oils in freshness of vision, physical immediacy, spontaneity of handling, and brilliancy of color. The viewer it speaks to isn't necessarily a hunter — it's anyone who has felt the charged silence of a wild place and understood, in their gut, that nature operates by its own indifferent rules.
