Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt (1893)

The important picture of the year 1893 was "The Fox Hunt." It has been variously known as the " Fox and Crows" and "Winter." The subject of this work is very novel, and requires a word of explanation as to the fact in natural history of which it is a dramatic illustration. In the depths of winter, when for long intervals the ground is covered with snow in Maine, it has been observed that a flock of halfstarved crows will occasionally have the temerity to attack a fox, relying on their advantage of numbers, the weakened condition of the fox, and the deep snow, which makes it peculiarly difficult for the victim either to defend himself or to escape. This, then, is the curious occurrence that Homer took for the subject of his picture, which is as original and forcible as the rest of his productions. In the snow which covers the foreground, near the shore, a weary and harassed fox is running painfully along, in his vain effort to find a refuge from his approaching foes. Two savage crows already hover nearly over him, ready to strike, and the rest of the hungry flock is seen coming rapidly to the spot from the direction of the shore. The canvas is large enough to permit the representation of a life-size fox, and the reddish color of his coat and brush in the midst of the expanse of white makes an interesting point in the color scheme. The ocean is visible in the distance, and overhead is a dark gray wintry sky, in which there are only two small rifts, allowing a cold silvery light to fall on the water near the left side of the picture. The green surf breaks on the rocks and throws up a cloud of spray. There is something uncommonly impressive and solemn about this stern and frigid landscape, and it seems a fit theatre for the impending catastrophe. The painting of the drifted snow in the foreground is exceedingly interesting in the delicate gradations of the values on the undulating surface, in the delicacy of its color, which is apparently very simple, yet is full of variety. The sky also is one that perhaps no other painter except Homer would have the courage to oppose to such a foreground, or, rather, that few other painters would be able to put in its right place.

Mr. Fowler cites this picture as an example of the fine sense of quantities in space that characterizes so markedly much of Homer's best work. "The disposition of the forceful spots in this rectangle is most happy," he writes. "The strong and daring mass of black offered by the crows in the upper right-hand corner, suggesting an even greater volume to the mass by the partly disappearing wings and the approaching numbers of crows — this black, modified and broken by the reflected light on the feathers and the surface light on the beaks, is further distributed by the accents of dark carried to the ears and left forepaw of the fox with fine judgment and effect. So much for the strong and organic notes of the picture. Nothing could show better control of these forcible accents than the manner in which the artist has chosen to place them on the canvas and then given them cohesion by silhouetting these telling spots of black against a darkened sky, and placing the lighter tonal value  

of the fox against the snow. The space in front of the fox suggests much distance for his apprehensive flight — the very direction of his head and ears unites these two active quantities of the scene."1
William Howe Downes, The Life and Works of Winslow Hiomer, 1911

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Dapper, small, inquisitive, shrewd, I see his portrait in the furry animal in the wonderful Fox Hunt.  Sometimes Maine winters were so severe that flocks of starving crows attacked foxes, and in Homer's view of the drama, two nightmare black birds (the nightmare of the flying black penis) swoop on a dainty fox encumbered in drifts of white snow.
--Thomas B. Hess. "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Winslow Homer Honey" New York Magazine June 11, 1973
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I found very disturbing Thomas Hess's review of the Winslow Homer Exhibit at the Whitney Museum.  While I don't wish to quarrel with Hess's reasonably plausible (although reductivist and sophomorically Freudian) interpretation of Homer's themes.  I feel it is a pity he allowed his view of the work to blind himself and his readers to its great pictorial beauty.


There is something depressingly cynical about finding "the nightmare of the flying black penis" in Homer's Fox Hunt while ignoring the painting's exquisite color and patterning (clearly influenced by Japanese prints), or in failing even to mention Homer's mastery of watercolor technique.  As for equating Homer with "amateurs and primitives" whose lack of control over their subject matter allows repressed or confused eroticism to surface, is Mr. Hess unfamiliar with Leonardo's St. John the Baptist?  What work of art does not reveal something unintended by its creator? 
Jilly Becker
Brooklyn
--Letter in New York Magazine July 2 1973
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Homer (1836-1910)
imagined nature, now immeasurably dis-
tanced from the world of Emerson, as a
cold and amoral environment of chance
and brutality, devoid of justice, except for
the inescapable rules of force.





Link:
Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics