The Cock Fight, detail

When painting sun-drenched Caribbean locales, Homer strove to maximize the transparency of his colors against the white paper. He shifted this practice, however, to paint The Cock Fight (figure b), incorporating opaque watercolors into the work as needed. Unlike his opaque watercolors of the early 1870s, here Homer did not mix zinc white with transparent pigments in order to render them opaque. Instead, he worked with opaque pigments themselves. For example, he used chrome orange …