Horse in the Woods

Courbet grew up in Ornans, in the wooded hill country near the Swiss border, and hunted in those forests all his life. That is the world this picture comes from, a riderless horse standing in dense woodland, the trees closing in dark and damp around it. He painted the undergrowth the way he painted everything, thickly and directly, often dragging the pigment with a knife rather than drawing each leaf. In 1863 the official Salon in Paris still found his plain, unheroic subjects hard to swallow. A horse alone among the trees, with no story attached and nobody riding it, was exactly the kind of ordinary thing Courbet thought worth the scale of a serious painting.