The drawing was executed in the Adirondack Mountains where Homer made yearly fishing and drawing expeditions from the late 1880s to 1894, often with his brother, Charles Savage Homer.1 The artist, his brother has reported, “usually caught the biggest fish.”2 He also produced watercolors generally regarded as his finest work in this medium.
In certain areas, as in the broken surface of the water, color has been scraped away to show the white of the paper. A technique of soaking and blotting has been used to create an effect of distant mist, as in the mountain background at the right and above.
The drawing has also been known as Deer in the Canada Woods, and Autumn Scene (Stag Swimming).
1. Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (1944), p. 114.
2. Quoted in Goodrich (1944), p. 114.
—Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Standish D. Lawder, and Charles W. Talbot, Jr., Drawings from the Clark Art Institute, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 1:145, no. 348.
