As well, it resembles John James Audubon's plate Golden-Eye Duck. It has been compared to avian subjects by Okyo Maruyama, Hiroshige, and Hokusai, and was included in a major Japonisme exhibition in Paris in 1988. Painting įor its "restrained color and extraordinary composition" the painting's debt to Japanese art has been noted by art historians. However, Homer was already familiar with this angle of shotgun blast, having in 1864 painted Defiance, a Civil War subject of a soldier being shot at, and in 1892 A Good Shot, Adirondacks, which shows the puff of distant rifle smoke and a mortally wounded deer hit in the foreground the latter especially anticipates the composition and intent of Right and Left. In Beam's telling, Homer stood atop a cliff at Prouts Neck while his neighbor Will Googins, fired blank charges in his direction from a rowboat offshore. Downes recounted that Homer took to sea in a boat, accompanied by a man with a double-barreled shotgun, and studied the movements of birds as they were shot. Likewise there are different versions regarding Homer's preparatory methods. Given the goldeneye's taste- Audubon called the duck "fishy, and in my opinion unfit for being eaten"- insofar as the implication is that the ducks were intended for food, neither story is altogether credible. Sprague shot the birds in Prouts Neck that autumn and hung them on Homer's studio door, and the arrangement inspired the painting's design. Homer's nephew told another of Homer's biographers, Philip Beam, that a friend of the artist named Phineas W. Homer's first biographer, William Howe Downes, wrote that the ducks used for the painting had been purchased by the artist for his Thanksgiving dinner he so admired their plumage that he painted them instead. Homer's biographers offer varying accounts of the events surrounding both the painting's conception and initial development.
With the hunter a distant element and the stricken animal placed in the foreground, this watercolor anticipates the composition of Right and Left.
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