O almoço de caça

Courbet painted this during a long stay in Germany in 1858, based near Frankfurt, where he'd been joining the grand stag hunts up in the Taunus hills. Other painters treated the hunt as drama, the chase, the kill. Courbet chose the dull part afterward, the picnic in the woods once the work is done. Men sit around bread and wine and a couple of dead deer, talking, resting, nobody posing. That plainness was the point. He was building a whole way of painting, Realism, out of exactly these unremarkable moments. The canvas is large, over three metres wide, the scale you'd expect for a grand history painting, given instead to a group of hunters having lunch. It has almost certainly never left Germany since he made it.