print? Most would agree that it was in the Salon of 1857 that, with his submission of Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (fig. 2) and The Quarry (fig. 3), the image of the hunt in Courbet’s oeuvre was inaugurated. Utter opposites at first glance, the two pictures make much more sense as a pair when read in light of realist criticism. At one level, they both adhere to the dictum prescribing unelevated subject matter. What could be more undignified than two women in undergarments cavorting publicly on a riverbank? And what could be less lofty than a huntsman privately surveying his recent kill? Beyond the level of content, however, is their realism at the level of form. One of the other criteria of realist discourse is that it be unmannered, anticlassical, and untutored in traditions of fine art drawing and composition — in short, brute. In Young Ladies, undressing leads to an explosion of fabric in which all relation to the female body is seemingly lost. In The Quarry, the hunter’s slaughtered prey, like the women in their ample folds of dress, forms a corporeal mass that has nothing to do with the nude, that ne plus ultra of beaux-arts training. It is almost as if fashion and fur have become pretexts for a symphony of textures wherein the artist’s sumptuous touch reaches a joyous crescendo. In these subjects of sexual desire and animality, respectively, Courbet broaches two kinds of experience that are primarily visceral. There is no doubt that the gargantuan Battle of the Stags (fig. 4), shown, like Fox in the Snow, at the Salon of 1861, follows a similar trajectory. The story behind its conception is well known. While staying in Frankfurt in 1859–60, Courbet went on daylong hunts in the local forests, where the primal cries of the hunted stags enthralled him.3 He created several large-scale paintings of stags, which were shown at various exhibitions in the following years. They were such a success that one even heard of the government’s planning to buy Battle of the Stags for the Musée du Luxembourg.4 By anthropomorphizing the beasts, Battle of the Stags offers one possible way that an animal painting could fit into a realist definition of art. Instead of Hector
figure 3 Gustave Courbet, The Quarry, 1856 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
and Achilles outside the gates of Troy, we witness antlered titans in an equally brutal battle to the death in a German forest. Of course, for Courbet, ever the savvy exhibitor, an allegorical reading of the image as a life-and-death struggle was probably intentional. The huge scale, combined with Courbet’s failure to finish any large figure paintings for the 1861 Salon, practically guaranteed that critical attention would gravitate toward Battle of the Stags.5 The strategy worked. For perhaps the first time in his career, there was almost universal praise.
figure 2 Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, 1856–57 Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit-Palais, Paris
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figure 4 Gustave Courbet, Battle of the Stags (Le Rut du printemps, combat des cerfs), 1861 Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Galvez
Courbet
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