溪边的狍子

Courbet was a serious hunter, and this is a hunter's painting: a roe deer at the water's edge, seen the way you'd catch it from downwind, an instant before it bolts. He made pictures like this through the late 1860s in the forests of his native Franche-Comté, and they sold well to men who shared his taste for the chase. Much of the ground and rock here is laid on with a palette knife, scraped and dragged rather than brushed, so grass reads as soft and stone as hard without a single fussy detail. He signed and dated it 1868, three years before the Paris Commune collapsed and took his fortune and his freedom with it.