I thought I’d seen most of the photographs of Ernest Hemingway, a very photographed man, but somehow I’d never seen this one, in the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, taken by the great war photographer Robert Capa in 1941, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Hemingway steps from a canoe, carrying a bottle of wine and a shotgun, his face in shadow. Twelve years earlier his father killed himself with a hand gun, and Hemingway’s mother sent him the gun as a memento. Exactly twenty years later, in Ketchum, Idaho, just around the corner from where this photo was taken, Hemingway would kill himself with his favourite Boss & Co bird-hunting shotgun. I think this photograph might be staged: there are no water droplets visible in the canoe from the paddle; the bottle appears to be full.
