Hirsch am Wasser

Gustave Courbet was a serious hunter, out for days in the forests of his native Jura, and in the late 1850s he began turning what he saw there into large paintings. This is the moment a hunted stag has plunged into a stream to break its scent and throw off the pack, whose dogs you can just make out closing in behind. Courbet knew that instant from experience rather than imagination. He showed the picture at the Paris Salon of 1861, when his hunting scenes were among his most admired and least controversial works, easier for the public than the peasants and funerals that had made his name. The city of Marseille bought it a few years later, and it has stayed there ever since.