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Capturing Cruelty

Camera Hunting, Water Killing, and Winslow Homer’s Adirondack Deer

Bibliographic Data

ID8105722
AuthorsAnnie Ronan (corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume31
Issue3
Pages52-79
Publication date2017-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Art (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1073-9300 • E-ISSN: 1549-6503
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/696115
OpenAlexW2770365032
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited10

In a series of watercolors executed between 1889 and 1892, Winslow Homer repeatedly forces the viewer into decidedly uncomfortable confrontations with dead and dying deer. Picturing a hunting method that American sportsmen condemned for being particularly cruel and difficult to watch, these works represent the artist’s engagement with late nineteenth-century debates about the perils of witnessing nonhuman suffering. Like many of Homer’s other late-career animal paintings, they meditate on the self-abnegation, the emotional and perceptual self-discipline, that the strictures of sport, science, and art then demanded from the human observer of animal pain. At a time when new photographic technologies, and specifically the newly established practice of “camera hunting,” promised easy relief from these humane dilemmas, Homer’s watercolors celebrate the heroism of struggling against sympathy, of striving for mechanical objectivity without mechanical means. His watercolor snapshots present an alternative vision of sporting art, a strenuous art for the strenuous life

Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Cruelty · Objectivity (philosophy · Painting · Sympathy · Visual arts · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Psychology

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Unique citing works10
Citations per year3,33
Citation span2023 - 2023 (1)
Citation velocityhistorical
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 10
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