La Curée

Courbet grew up hunting in the Franche-Comté, near the Swiss border, and in 1857 he finally put that life on a Salon wall. The Quarry shows the end of a deer hunt in the Jura forests: a roe deer strung up by a hind leg, two dogs, a horn-blower, and Courbet himself leaning against a tree, pipe in hand, gun beside him. The critic Théophile Gautier singled out the dead animal as one of the best things in the show, praising its thick felted coat and wet nose. Courbet had actually assembled the picture in stages, adding the young man and the dogs on extra strips of canvas after he began. Nine years later it became the first of his paintings to cross the Atlantic, bought by a club of Boston collectors.