About this work
*Right and Left* is an 1909 oil on canvas in which a pair of common goldeneye ducks are caught at the precise instant a hunter's shotgun blast finds them mid-flight. The composition is visceral and immediate: the sea below is choppy and dark gray, with waves of lighter blue creating a turbulent atmosphere, while a thin sliver of reddish-orange sunrise barely edges above the horizon and a single feather drifts free in the sky. What makes the scene so disorienting — and so unforgettable — is Homer's choice of vantage point. The viewer appears to hover in mid-air, at one with the threatened creatures and directly in the path of the oncoming shotgun blast.
The hunter himself remains unseen; there is smoke, but it is barely visible — only the ducks command the frame.
The picture captures the moment but leaves important questions unresolved: the downward plunge of the bird on the right might signal a hit, or a dive to escape, while the duck on the left seems frozen in a stasis that reveals nothing about its fate.
Homer referred to the work in a letter to his brother Charles dated December 8, 1908, calling it "a most surprising picture."
Completed less than two years before his death, it was his last great painting and represents a return to the sporting and hunting subjects of his earlier years — his final engagement with the theme.
With its ambiguous message, unconventional point of view, and diverse sources of inspiration ranging from Japanese art to popular hunting imagery, the painting summarizes the creative complexity of Homer's late style.
Although it belongs to a popular tradition of sporting subjects, given both the violence of its content and the year of its making, *Right and Left* has invited metaphysical interpretation — for art historian John Wilmerding, it embodies "a sense of the momentary and the universal, mortality illuminated by showing these creatures at the juncture of life and death."
*Right and Left* is widely regarded as one of the most powerful and innovative paintings in the history of American art, and it carries that weight into any space it occupies. It belongs in a room that can hold silence — a study, a dark-walled dining room, a hallway where light comes from a single source. It speaks to the viewer who wants art that doesn't resolve easily: the hunter who has stood at the edge of the Atlantic, the naturalist, the collector drawn to beauty coexisting with violence. Hung at eye level, the ducks remain at eye level with you — suspended, perpetually mid-plunge, the horizon a cold sliver of dawn behind them.
