Le chevreuil

In 1876 Courbet was living in exile on the shore of Lake Geneva, at La Tour-de-Peilz in Switzerland. Five years earlier he had taken part in the Paris Commune and been blamed for the toppling of the Vendome Column. The new French government handed him a bill to rebuild it that he could never hope to pay, and rather than face prison he had crossed the border in 1873. To raise money in those last years he turned out saleable pictures like this one, a single dead roe deer laid against a dark ground. Game had followed him through his whole career, from the grand hunting scenes of the 1850s to a small study like this. He painted it a year before he died at La Tour-de-Peilz, on the last day of 1877. It entered the Petit Palais in Paris in 1913, the gift of the critic Theodore Duret, an old defender of his work.