The Covert of Roe Deer in Winter

Courbet was a serious hunter, and he painted deer the way a hunter sees them, not as gentle emblems but as animals in a real cold wood. This snow scene shows hunters handing killed roe deer to a forester, set in the white, grey-brown winter country he knew from the Loue valley around his home town of Ornans. He worked on pictures like this in the mid-1860s, and there is a practical detail behind them. In an 1866 letter he told his parents he had rented live deer from a Paris game dealer to pose in his studio. The Lyon museum bought the painting in 1883, a few years after he died in exile, and it has stayed there since.