Courbet, Gustave (1819-1877)
Après la chasse (After the Hunt)
c.1859
Oil on canvas, 236.2 x 186.1 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In style, scale, and composition, this work strongly resembles Courbet’s first hunting scene, The Quarry, a great success at the Salon of 1857 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The present canvas is distinguished by the inclusion of a liveried servant and an assortment of dead game: a wild boar, a partridge, a deer, and a hare, all presented in a manner recalling seventeenth-century Flemish painting. An avid sportsman, Courbet ultimately devoted some eighty pictures to the subject of the hunt. (MET)