Right and Left
Although it is a painting of a sporting subject, and thus was part of a popular anecdotal tradition, given both the violence of the subject and the fact that it was painted the year before Homer's death, "Right and Left" has invited metaphysical interpretation. For art historian John Wilmerding, the painting embodied "a sense of the momentary and the universal, mortality illuminated by showing these creatures at the juncture of life and death". It represents the summation of Homer's sporting pictures, and presents its subject with an "almost testamentary finality".