Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
Seashore, Maine, dead of winter. Waves, deafening waves, assault the boulders lining the seashore. Snow, whalebone-white with blue undertones, blankets stone and soil by the waves. Tension, anxious stillness, smothers the landscape as it struggles against the weight of the snow.
Against this forbidding backdrop, American painter Winslow Homer (1836–1910) introduces us to a fox treading through the snowy foreground. A red fox, abundant in Maine. Homer’s is accurately black-eared and black-legged, its fur orange in the sun, a dollop of white crowning the tip of its tail.
But it’s thin, emaciated. Hungry and hunting. It must have been a week since its last meal; where, in this environment, could it find anything? 12 red berries hang from a leafless shrub to its left, a meager fare. There’s little else on the shoreline, a field of ice.
It’s also slipping, slipping in glacial quicksand. Its hind legs are being consumed, and gravity isn’t on its side. The snow is crunching underneath its feet, crisp and squeaky, thawed by its red-orange warmth.
In this 1893 canvas, we don’t see the fox face-to-face. It’s a kind of nonhuman “Rückenfigur,” a portrait from behind the subject that instantly thrusts us into its mind, body and predicament regardless of whether we so choose. Put differently, this painting is not merely an invitation to identify and sympathize with the animal, but a mandate to become it.
So, let’s follow Homer’s instructions and see what the fox might see, feel what the fox might feel.
The sharp but numbing pain of frigid ice crystals on your skin. The overwhelming stimulation of ocean and snow and wind and hunger and the ground giving way when you need it most — and then without warning, black masses begin circling above, their raucous caws piercing the raw bitter air, their pitch-black feathers rendering them demons in low light, flapping and cawing, cawing like laughing.
These crows, they’re ravenous, too. They’re in search of a meal hearty enough to feed all seven of them. The two ringleaders of the group have set their sights on our fox, beckoning over the remaining birds, eyeing it over and considering how best to proceed.
Do crows eat foxes? The painting’s title, “The Fox Hunt,” answers in the affirmative. But no matter; anything will eat anything if the conditions require it.
But, more pressingly, what is our fox to do? It has not the advantage of flight nor the energy to sustain a fight. It’s grounded by gravity and being pulled deeper down. It set out as a predator and now finds itself the prey. It suffers a reversal of fortunes and fates.
What looms in the air between one lone fox and seven restless crows — two directly above, five more incoming?
Homer considers this question carefully. He animates that air with kinetic drama, between the bellowing of the birds and the ruffling of their feathers. He charges it with electric anticipation in leaving open what comes next. And, crucially, he permeates it with a delicate precarity that binds both species, because they’re playing a zero-sum game. We’re bearing witness to a terrifyingly ruthless Darwinian struggle for the privilege of survival.
I want to turn your attention to the lower left corner of the composition, where Homer has signed (and dated) the picture. “HOMER,” in slanted capital letters half-sunken in snow. The serif on the “H” peeks out above the ice; so, too, with the bushy tail of the “R.” The front leg and tail of his signature overtly echo those of his fox.
What are the implications of this mirroring of forms? Homer implies that he identifies with this fox’s plight — or, at least, with the fox itself, often symbolic of shrewdness and cunning. He was 57 when he made this picture; was he thinking about the permanence of his life’s work and of his legacy? Darwin had published his theory of natural selection a mere three decades prior in 1859 — was this a commentary on the gut-wrenching reality of interspecies dynamics?
Or, considering that Homer loved the ocean and did indeed paint “The Fox Hunt” in winter, is this scene a broader meditation on the insignificance of any single temporal existence in the face of Nature and her forces?
These questions make me think of another, later work by Homer, one he created months before his death in 1909, sixteen years after “The Fox Hunt.” “Right and Left,” it’s called. It shows two goldeneye ducks, their plumage rendered with virtuosic precision, shot mid-flight by a hunter at sea. Two elegant, startled birds in that state of limbo between life and death, moments before falling into the waves, never again to fly.
It makes me think Homer is continually mulling over ideas about transience and legacy — and about how best to capture these tensions of life in paint. In his seascapes and shorescapes we find fearful and staggeringly beautiful depictions of violence, precarity and the exigencies of survival. These poetic pictures present themselves as open questions with little interest in specific, concrete answers. Their tensions and ambiguities are as complex as the natural dynamics they describe.
When Homer signed “The Fox Hunt” in letters half-obscured by snow, I wonder if he worried his legacy would suffer a similar fate, drowned out by vicissitudes of time and taste.
Today, he’s hardly a household name. But he need not worry. The paintings he left behind — those are timeless.