The most important character in this watercolor never appears. Winslow Homer paints two deer at the exact moment they sense another presence nearby, and he leaves it to you to decide who, or what, has just walked up.
What you're looking at
A doe and a buck stand at the edge of a mountain meadow. The meadow is a warm yellow-green, full of flowers, and beyond it rise cool purple-blue mountains. Two tall white pine trees stand against the view. The mood is a peaceful summer day, with one small break in it: the deer have stopped and looked up. Homer painted it in 1892 in watercolor, and the Art Institute of Chicago notes he used rewetting, blotting and scraping to shape the paper's surface.
A place Homer kept returning to
Homer made more than twenty visits to the Adirondacks, in northern New York, between 1870 and 1910. His usual destination was the North Woods Club, a rustic private retreat on nearly five thousand acres. He liked the privacy, the subjects, and the excellent fishing, and he painted more than a hundred Adirondack scenes in watercolor. He signed this one “Winslow Homer 1892 / Northwoods Club N.Y.” In pencil on the back, he wrote the title: “The Interrupted tete-a-tete, Adirondacks.”
The hint hiding in the trees
Homer never says what he thinks in this picture, but his audience would have caught the message. White pine had been badly over-cut in those years, and the region's white-tailed deer were dwindling, partly because more city visitors were hunting them. Notice the pairing: two pines, two deer. The Art Institute says the pines echo the deer, so both threatened things stand side by side.
Homer also took care over the details. He drew the pines and the deer in pencil first, so that each species could be clearly recognized before he added any color. The hunter, if there is one, stays out of sight.
One detail to look for
Find the two deer, then find the two pines beside them. The picture asks you to feel a small worry without ever showing its cause.
Where it went next
By 1910 the watercolor belonged to Homer's brother Charles. In 1915 the New York dealer Knoedler sold it to the Chicago collector Martin A. Ryerson, and it came to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1933 as part of the Ryerson Collection.