Caça à Raposa

Winslow Homer painted this in the winter of 1893 at Prouts Neck, the stretch of Maine coast where he lived alone. It is his largest canvas, and its subject is pure survival: a fox laboring through deep snow while a flock of half-starved crows closes in, betting that the drifts and the cold have weakened it enough to be taken. Homer worked from life as far as he could. He draped a fox pelt over a barrel in the snow to get the colors right, and to study the birds he and a friend spent three days scattering corn to lure crows he could sketch. When it was shown the next year, the Pennsylvania Academy bought it in 1894, the first painting by Homer to enter a major museum collection.