Indians Making Canoes (Montagnais Indians)

During the 1890s, Winslow Homer traveled extensively in the northern regions of the province of Quebec on fishing expeditions, led by Indigenous guides. There, he created a series of watercolors of Innu (Montagnais) camps showing women making birchbark canoes. Homer captured various stages of preparing and bending the bark, which, like the aqueous watercolor medium, is worked wet, to make it pliable around a wooden frame.