Capriolo appeso

Courbet grew up hunting in the hills of the Franche-Comte, near the Swiss border, and he painted the hunt as a man who had done it. He sent a deer-hunt picture to the Paris Salon of 1857, where critics who loathed his peasants and his politics were content enough with his game, and canvases like this one followed. It is nearly two metres tall and gives all of that height to a single roe deer hung up by the legs. Some 40 years later Hendrik Willem Mesdag, the Dutch marine painter who was filling his house in The Hague with French pictures, bought it, in August 1898. He handed the whole collection to the Dutch state in 1903, and it is still there.