Summer 2017

2017 Antiques & Fine Art 139 Fig. 5: N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945), Deep Cove Lobster Man, ca. 1938. Oil on gessoed board (Renaissance Panel), 16¼ x 22¾ inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pa. Joseph E. Temple Fund (1939.16). trapper also mirrors a broader anxiety caused by the violent con- flicts between the two cultures and its impact on the future of the West. The earliest European narratives of the New World painted a forested land teeming with catamounts, wolves, and especially bears. With industrialization in the nineteenth century, images of men who came face-to-face with bears, the most powerful predator on the North American continent, took on a larger meaning for factory workers in burgeoning urban centers who would have recognized and identified with the dangers bears posed because they too faced risks. Instead of the jagged teeth in a bear’s maw, laborers confronted the regularly spaced teeth of sprockets and cogs that could devour human limbs with the same ferocity. In A Tight Fix—Bear Hunting, Earl Winter (The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix) (Fig. 3), painted in 1856, the only thing standing between the hunter and being mauled to death is his companion in the background, taking aim at the bear with his rifle, suggesting hope in an uncertain world. For the brave, the potential for reward outweighed the many life-threatening risks associated with hunting and f ishing. Commercial hunters, as depicted in Winslow Homer’s Huntsman and Dogs (Fig. 4), and N. C. Wyeth’s fisherman in Deep Cove Lobsterman (Fig. 5), saw the outdoor life as offering a livelihood. For the sportsman, a trophy provided an impressive symbol of mascu- linity and mortality, and nostalgia by memorializing the thrill of the hunt. A growing number of sportsmen recorded the success of their hunt with a trophy painting. Artists responded by creating trompe l’oeil still lifes, painted so realistically as to present the depicted objects in three dimensions. These portrayals of lifeless animals visually transformed elegantly appointed Victorian parlors into trophy rooms, and ornately decorated dining rooms into showcases where the well-to-do dined amid a smorgasbord of nature’s bounty of deer, fish, rabbits, and wildfowl, forever immortalized in paint and on elaborate sideboards carved with images of game. While dining in the presence of carved carcasses and painted corpses might seem distasteful to modern sensibilities, Victorians viewed