Ciervo saltando

Courbet spent the winter of 1858 in Frankfurt, went out with the local hunting parties there, and came back with deer in his work for good. By the mid-1860s the hunting pictures were the part of his output that sold without an argument. In 1866 he sent a large canvas of roe deer at a stream to the Paris Salon, and some of the same critics who had spent a decade calling him crude wrote warmly about it. This smaller picture is from around the same time and catches one animal in the middle of its leap. The Pushkin Museum dates it to about 1866 and traces it to the collection of a Russian owner, M. B. Benediktov.