Schneelandschaft im Jura, mit Reh

Courbet grew up in the Franche-Comte, on the western edge of the Jura mountains, and he hunted there all his life. In the mid-1860s he painted a run of winter scenes from that country, snow lying heavy on the slopes, the light flat and cold. Here a single roe deer stands in the middle distance, small against the white, half lost in the grey of the trees. There is no story being told and no drama staged. Courbet built the snow up in thick, worked paint, sometimes dragging it with a palette knife, so the surface itself feels like crusted snow. He made it in 1866, a good decade before politics drove him out of France into exile in Switzerland, where he died.