Hound and Hunter

Hound and Hunter belongs to the cycle of Adirondack hunting subjects Winslow Homer produced from his camp in the mountains of upstate New York in the early 1890s, a series that also includes Guide Carrying a Deer and Deer in the Adirondacks. Shown in 1892 at New York’s Union League Club under the title In the Adirondacks, the large canvas fixes on the exhausted hound at the waterside and treats the outcome of the guide’s hunt with a bluntness that unsettled even sympathetic viewers. In his preparatory watercolor Homer had included a rifle that he later painted out, concentrating the image on the partnership of dog and woodsman at the moment’s hushed close. Acquired by the National Gallery in 1947, it ranks among the most uncompromising of his late wilderness canvases.