Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare

The hare stretched on its back at the left was, it seems, a real one that Courbet bought to paint from. The story comes from Otto Scholderer, a young German painter whose studio in Frankfurt sat directly above the one Courbet rented in the winter of 1858. Scholderer wrote to his friend in Paris, the painter Henri Fantin-Latour, about a canvas downstairs showing two hounds and a hare, and the Met believes he meant this one. The dogs and the woodland, he said, were painted from memory. Only the hare had been in front of Courbet. The same two hounds, one liver and white, the other black and white, had already stood over a dead deer in The Quarry, a larger hunting scene now in Boston. This is probably the canvas Courbet sent to the Paris World's Fair of 1867 under the title The Hare Run Down.