The Stag in the Forest

Courbet built his reputation on provoking people, with huge, plain-spoken pictures of ordinary life that critics found crude. Deer paintings like this one were a quieter side of him, and they sold. He hunted whenever he went home to Ornans, in the wooded hills of eastern France, and he painted the animals from close knowledge rather than imagination. Here a stag stands alert among the trees, the forest light broken up around it. He made this in 1867, the same year he put up his own pavilion in Paris to show his work outside the official Exposition Universelle. By then he had painted well over 50 hunting scenes, the deer his favourite subject of all.