Poachers in the snow

Courbet grew up hunting in the Franche-Comte, the hilly country near the Swiss border, and he returned to snow and game again and again. He knew this world firsthand. In 1867 Paris was hosting a vast world's fair, and Courbet, already notorious for pushing realism and poor country people into the official Salon, put up his own pavilion nearby to show his work on his own terms. Snowy hunting scenes like this one sold steadily and helped pay for that independence. He studied the light on the snow with real care, letting the hunters and their dogs cast faint coloured shadows across the white slope.