Focus on this artwork and discuss the Background.
In May 1908 Homer suffered temporary impairment of his speech and muscular control as the effects of a mild stroke; on June 4 he wrote his brother Charles that "I can paint as well as ever. I think my pictures better for having one eye in the pot and one eye up a chimney— a new departure in the art world." By July 18 he was able to write that he had regained his abilities with the exception of tying "my neck tie in the way that I have done for the past 20 years....Every four or five days I try to do it but....it has been of no use." Although he never completely recovered, Homer was well enough to attempt a major work, and it is probably Right and Left that he referred to in a letter to his brother Charles dated December 8, 1908: "I am painting when it is light enough on a most surprising picture".
Homer's biographers offer varying accounts of the events surrounding both the painting's conception and initial development. 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 nephew told another of Homer's biographers, Philip Beam, that a friend of the artist named Phineas W. 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. 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.Likewise there are different versions regarding Homer's preparatory methods. 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. 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. 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.
Will Googins Prouts Neck plumage Civil War double-barreled shotgun