Ciervo corriendo en la nieve

Courbet loved to hunt, and he loved to paint what he hunted. The deer was his favourite animal, and here a stag bolts across an open snowfield, head turned back toward the danger behind it, its dark body tense against the white. He built that snow with a palette knife rather than a brush, dragging and scraping the paint so the surface catches light the way crusted snow does. Dark clouds press in from the right. Courbet would go on to make dozens of hunting scenes over his career, and snow was a subject he made his own. He painted this around 1856, and pictures like it, his hunting and snow scenes, were the ones that sold, even while critics kept attacking his bigger, blunter canvases at the Paris Salon.