After the Hunt

Gustave Courbet

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

After the Hunt is a large-scale Realist oil painting by Gustave Courbet depicting the aftermath of a hunt, featuring a liveried servant alongside an array of dead game including a wild boar, a partridge, a deer, and a hare, rendered in a manner that recalls seventeenth-century Flemish painting. Courbet, born in Ornans, France in 1819, was the preeminent champion of Realism in nineteenth-century French art, committed to depicting the observable world with unflinching directness. An avid sportsman himself, Courbet ultimately devoted some eighty pictures to the subject of the hunt, fusing the genres of landscape and animal painting on a monumental scale. This work closely mirrors the scale and composition of his celebrated first hunting scene, The Quarry, shown at the Paris Salon of 1857, and stands as a significant example of his mature engagement with the hunt as both personal experience and painterly subject.