Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare
1857
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
36 1/2 x 58 1/2 in. (92.7 x 148.6 cm)
Classification
Paintings
Department
European Paintings
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Gift of Horace Havemeyer, 1933
Accession Number
33.77
Tags
About this artwork
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), the pioneering French Realist, painted this powerful hunting scene in 1857, the year he debuted hunting subjects at the Paris Salon. The 36½ by 58½ inch oil on canvas depicts two dogs facing off in a forest setting, awaiting their absent owner, with a dead hare as sole trace of human presence. Courbet repeated the dogs from his slightly earlier "The Quarry" (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), which featured a stag, hunter, and servant, but here eliminated human figures to...
About the Artist
Gustave Courbet · 1819–1877
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was a French painter who revolutionized 19th-century art as the founding figure of the Realism movement. Born in Ornans, a small town in the Doubs region of France, Courbet came from a prosperous farming family with anti-monarchical roots—his maternal grandfather had participated in the French Revolution. This background shaped his lifelong commitment to dep...