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Around 1860 Gustave Courbet was the loud champion of a new idea in French painting: show the world exactly as it is, with no polish and no moral. He turned that principle on a fox. In a flat field of snow the animal crouches over a rodent it has just caught, and Courbet lets the red of the blood sit plainly against the white. There is no drama of the hunt and no noble stag of the Romantic painters he had pushed aside, only an animal feeding in the cold. When it reached the Salon of 1861, French audiences were used to nature dressed up as poetry, and this was nature at its plainest. He painted it near his native Ornans, in the Franche-Comté country whose winters he knew.