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North Woods Club, Adirondacks (The Interrupted Tete-a-Tete)
Winslow Homer (American, 1836-1910)
1892
- Medium
- Watercolor, with rewetting, blotting and scraping, over graphite, on thick, moderately textured, ivory wove paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 38 × 54.5 cm (15 × 21 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
In numerous watercolors, Homer explored aspects of the controversy over deer hunting practices in the Adirondack region without overtly expressing his own opinion. In North Woods Club, Adirondacks (The Interrupted Tête-à-tête), hunting is only hinted at in a subliminal way. Homer pictured two white-tailed deer, a doe and a buck, at the edge of a mountain meadow. Homer selected the exact moment when the deer become aware of another presence, the identity of whom is left to the viewer’s imagination. He juxtaposed a yellow-green flowering meadow with cool, purple-blue mountains, creating an entrancing summer vista. Yet Homer alluded to a less-benign narrative that would have been clear to his contemporaries. Two tall white pines stand silhouetted against the view, echoing the two deer. White pine had been dangerously over harvested in this period, and worry over its dwindling numbers in the Adirondacks paralleled concern for excessive hunting of deer. Homer drew the pine trees and deer carefully in pencil before adding watercolor, making sure that the distinctive characteristics of both threatened species would be clearly identifiable.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
