Le chevreuil

A roe deer killed in the hunt hangs from the trunk of a tree before an autumn thicket, recorded with the frank naturalism of Courbet’s late hunting studies. Painted in 1876, during the artist’s Swiss exile, the dead-game subject continues the tradition of the seventeenth-century Dutch hunt pieces that he renewed without idealising his prey. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.