Der deutsche Jäger

Courbet painted this out of a German adventure. In the autumn of 1858 he settled for months in Frankfurt, where local admirers gave him a studio, and he threw himself into the grand stag hunts of the wooded Taunus hills nearby. He was already notorious back in France as the head of the Realists, the painter who insisted on ordinary, unidealised fact. That same eye went into the forest with him. His hunting pictures, this huntsman among them, came from beasts and men he had watched at close range rather than invented. He was a boastful sportsman too. On one New Year's hunt he brought down a stag he reckoned 13 years old, and he kept its teeth, antlers and hide as trophies.