冬日的森林

Gustave Courbet grew up in the Franche-Comte, hunting country in eastern France, and he came back again and again to its woods and animals. This snowbound forest from 1860 is one of those pictures. Bare trees stand in deep snow, and three deer move quietly among them, easy to miss at first glance. Courbet often laid the paint on thickly with a palette knife, and here the built-up whites give the snow real weight and cold. He painted these hunting and winter scenes partly because they sold well to collectors who would not touch his large provocative pictures of peasants and labourers. It entered the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1913.