Spring Rut. Battle of the Stags

In April 1861, just before this canvas went to the Paris Salon, Courbet wrote to his friend, the writer Francis Wey, explaining where it came from. He had gone to Germany to study it. He had watched stags fight in the game parks of Homburg and Wiesbaden, and he had followed the German hunts around Frankfurt for six months, a whole winter, until he shot a stag himself and used it for this picture. The result is more than five metres wide. Two males lock antlers on the left while a third breaks away to the right, deep in a dark wood. The next year it travelled to the international exhibition in London. It stayed with Courbet until his death, then passed to his sister Juliette, and the French state bought it at the Hôtel Drouot sale of his studio in December 1881.