After the Hunt

Courbet spent the winter of 1858 into 1859 in Frankfurt, where local collectors took him up and German hunting parties took him out. On a hunt there at the very end of the year he brought down a stag reckoned to be 13 years old. The trip produced a run of hunting pictures, and this is one of them. A servant in livery sits beside the day's game, a boar, a deer, a hare and a partridge, with the hounds crowded around him, arranged and lit much the way a 17th-century Flemish game piece would be.

There was a market reason for the subject. The Quarry, shown at the Salon of 1857, was the first of his canvases that critics and buyers agreed about, and hunting pictures kept selling for him while his peasant subjects made enemies. He came back to the theme around 80 times. This one is over two metres tall, and it reached New York in 1929 in the bequest of Louisine Havemeyer.