Leaping Trout (1889): Art, History and Details

Leaping Trout (1889) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In 1886, Winslow Homer began to produce oil paintings and watercolors of subjects in the Adirondack Mountains, where he and his brother Charles had fished and hunted since the 1870s. In Leaping Trout, a silvery trout propels itself from the water in pursuit of a hapless insect or a fisherman’s fly. Homer’s choice to adopt the fish’s perspective, rather than a fisherman’s, is quite unconventional and heightens the drama and immediacy of the scene. His technique, influenced by the free brushwork of French Impressionism, similarly animates his still-life subject. Luminous washes of transparent blue and grey watercolor suggest the fish’s iridescent skin, while opaque pricks of bright red on its body lend a decorative effect reminiscent of Japanese prints. On the water’s surface, Homer uses scraping to create two brilliant white highlights, and dry brushing to produce the impression of a reflective surface. Although the overall effect is mysterious and dreamlike, the color and movement of the fish is carefully studied, suggesting Homer’s desire to appeal to the sportsmen who might buy his works.

Object facts

• Title: Leaping Trout
• Date: 1889
• Creator attribution: Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor over graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 35 x 50.6 cm (13 3/4 x 19 15/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1973.142

A detail from the museum

Noted for his technical variety in watercolors, Homer used a technique called scraping—removing softened paint and paper fibers by taking a blunt or sharp object to the paper’s wet surface—to produce the pond’s two glistening white highlights.

Collection credit

Anonymous Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art. Catalogue of an Exhibition of American Painting from 1860 Until Today. Cleveland, OH: Printed by the Artcraft Printing Co., 1937.
• Whitney Museum of American Art and Lloyd Goodrich. Winslow Homer. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973.
• "Annual Report for 1973." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 61, no. 6 (1974): 179-213.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.