Landschaft mit totem Pferd

Courbet built his reputation in the 1850s on painting ordinary, unheroic things exactly as they were, at a time when serious French painting was still expected to show gods, battles or noble history. This small canvas is about as far from that as you can get. A dead horse lies in the foreground of an empty landscape, taking up most of the picture, painted in dark, muddy tones with no story attached and nothing to soften what you are looking at. There is no rider, no accident to explain, no moral. Courbet simply treated a carcass as a subject worth oil paint, the same way he treated stonebreakers and village funerals, and left the animal lying where the eye first falls.