Лежащая косуля

Courbet signed this one in the corner, G.C. 57, and kept it small, about 33 by 41 centimetres, a dead doe lying on the ground. Its later history is the strange part. In the autumn of 1942 the Germans took it in Paris under the Moebel-Aktion, the operation that stripped the homes of deported Jewish families of their furniture and their pictures. It came back to France in 1947 with no owner anyone could name, so it was catalogued MNR 652, one of the recovered works the French state holds in trust while it looks for the family, and in 1953 the Louvre sent it out to the museum in Oran, in Algeria. Thieves took it from there over a night in late October 1985. It surfaced 16 years later in a Paris auction catalogue, was seized, and reached the Musee d'Orsay in 2002. The stamp of a Rotterdam art club is still on the back of the canvas.