Contested Terrain: Gustave Courbet's Hunting Scenes

Contested Terrain: Gustave Courbet's Hunting Scenes

Shao-Chien Tseng

During his lifelong quest to develop a Realist aesthetic,Gustave Courbet elaborated on the Romantic legacy thatemphasized artistic subjectivity and natural vision. With thegoal of interpreting the manners and ideas of his time, heproduced an oeuvre that reflected his critical understandingof and articulated historical problems in how humans per-ceived and treated animals. This is especially evident in hishunting scenes, chiefly painted between 1856 and 1869,which display a profound conflict between the desire topursue and master wildlife and mourning for the prey'sunnatural death. Courbet's multilayered series of huntingpaintings, which defy the unity of coherent narrative, may beread as the artist's inscription in the charged historical mo-ment of the revival of royal venery, middle-class enthusiasmfor the hunt, and the rising animal protection movement ofnineteenth-century France. His representations of the huntelicited divergent reactions from his contemporaries, whichsignal the crisis and attempted reinvention of the tradition ofthis pictorial genre. In the face of an increasingly urbanized,industrial, and capitalistic society, Courbet sustained his ar-tistic practice by drawing on the resilience and nurturing ofnature, which provided him with vital sources of artistic in-spiration, spiritual healing, rural bourgeois identity, physicalexercise, dreams, and memory.' Courbet saw in nature a richand complex ensemble, encompassing the environment andits various organisms, humanity, and the instincts. His em-brace of nature as a guiding principle of life is manifest in aletter to his writer friend Champfleury in 1863: "1 take myconvictions from nature, and for me the totality of men andthings is nature."2 Courbet's conception of nature epitomizesa fundamental desire for the fullness of existence; it is notopposed to culture or history as otherness but is ratherinterwoven with art and philosophy. Courbet's huntingscenes call attention to human-animal relations mediated bycultural values and embody his endeavors to resolve thecontested identities of both modern artist and hunter.

While Courbet's landscape, hunting, and animal paintingswere often admired for their innovative techniques and vir-tuoso facture and effects, the artist's erstwhile defendersTh6ophile Thor6 and Francis Wey,3 as well as modern schol-ars Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, and Anne Wagner consideredthem to be devoid of sociopolitical significance, little morethan conciliatory gestures to the market.4 The consensus has,however, changed in recent decades, and Courbet's land-scapes are now investigated in social, geologic, and phenom-enological terms and linked to the impact of Jean-JacquesRousseau's work of educational philosophy, Emile.5 AlthoughCourbet's hunting imagery has garnered scant scholarly at-tention, the empathy and respect for the hunted animalsportrayed have been duly noted. Klaus Herding read thesequalities as a metaphor for political persecution, and JamesRubin construed them as a call for ethical responsibility

toward nature. 6 In a more extensive article, Kerstin Thomasargued that Courbet's hunting scenes are expressive of hispersona as a provincial savage and his adoption of the Frenchvenery tradition.7 Such observations are largely based on theartist's biography, rather than Courbet's hunting images,whose historical, psychological, and aesthetic complexitiesmerit further study, for a number of questions remain to beexplored. There is the apparent discrepancy between wordsand visual representations: What accounts for the gap be-tween the innovative paintings and the conventional veneryterminology of their titles? Is there a dynamic interplay oreven a productive dissonance to be found between Courbet'sletters, notes, and paintings? What manner of debate overhunting and animal issues informed Courbet's reconceptual-ization of the traditional genre? What role did hunting playin defining notions of masculinity, and how did Courbet'swork negotiate with the norm? What kind of spectatorshipwas addressed or encouraged by the paintings, which failed towin the government support and aristocratic patronage thatworks in the hunting genre had enjoyed in the past? Anexamination of these hitherto neglected questions can teaseout the psychological resonances and social struggles embed-ded in Courbet's hunting scenes and writings and elucidatehow they contributed to mid-nineteenth-century French nat-ural history and animal rights discourses.

Courbet concentrated on two aspects of the hunt-thecapture and suffering of the quarry and the hunter's peacefuland reflective moment afterward. This thematic treatmentdeparted radically from the two dominant approaches to thesubject of the period. One is the continuation of the deco-rative and propagandist functions that the hunting genrefulfilled for patrons and spectators in the eighteenth century.Franýois Desportes (1661-1743) and Jean-Baptiste Oudry(1686-1755) depicted the favored animals and hunting ex-ploits of French monarchs Louis XIV and Louis XV respec-tively in paintings that decorated royal palaces and ch?iteaux,including Versailles and Marly (Fig. 1).s Their compositionscarefully exploit the effects of colorful patterns and livelymovement on the plane surface of the canvas and, with theglorification of an elitist blood sport, tacitly acknowledgeroyal prerogatives. The critical fortunes of Desportes andOudry enjoyed a revival in the middle of the nineteenthcentury; Charles Blanc, in his influential Histoire des peintres detoutes les &coles: Ecole franpaise, expressed nostalgia for thebygone monarchy and its magnificent venery culture andcelebrated the two artists' accurate portrayals of animal anat-omy, physiognomy, and habits, as well as the delightful, splen-did, and vivacious effects of decoration they created.9 Thepictorial combination of naturalism and artifice was muchemulated by Louis-GodefroyJadin (1805-1882) and PhilippeRousseau (1816-1887), who won support from importantfinanciers and the court of Napoleon III during the Second

CONTESTED TERRAIN: GUSTAVE COURBET'S HUNTING SCENES 219

1 Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Louis XVHunting the Stag in the Forest of Saint-Germain, 1730, oil on canvas, 6 ft.11/8 in. X 12 ft. 8 in. (211 X 387 cm).Mus6e des Augustins, Toulouse, RO182 (artwork in the public domain;photograph © R6union des mus&esnationaux / Daniel Arnaudet /G6rard Blot)

2 Louis-Godefroyjadin, The Quarry, 1841, oil on canvas, 57 x89¾/4 in. (145 X 228 cm). Mus6e de l'Abbaye Royale, ChaAlis(artwork in the public domain; photograph © R6union desmus6es nationaux / Bulloz)

Empire (Fig. 2).10 The other prevalent trend was that of the

Oriental or primitive hunts, which had flourished since the

July Monarchy and formed an artistic response to French

colonialism in Africa. The paintings of Eughne Delacroix,

Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Eughne Fromentin demon-

strate a strong fascination with the sublime ferocity of exotic

wildlife-such as tigers and lions-and the savage masculinity

of Arabic hunters (Fig. 3). In contrast to these two modes of

representation, Courbet's hunting scenes refuse to revel in

the victory, plenitude, and possession that the royal commis-

sions persistently conveyed, nor do they conjure a fantastic

spectacle of wilderness and exoticism. Rather, they constitute

a Realist vision of the anguish and death of the quarry, an

alternative strategy to revitalize history painting, and a prob-

ing inquiry into the artist-hunter's inner journey. Courbet's

paintings engage with the notion of hunting as a native

heritage and masculine sport and, at the same time, through

ethical and aesthetic reflection, achieve a dialectic between

familiarity and strangeness, between belonging and alien-

ation in an uncanny geography.

3 Eughne Delacroix, The Tiger Hunt, 1854, oil on canvas, 28V8X 363/8 in. (73.5 X 92.5 cm). Mus6e d'Orsay, Paris, RF 1814(artwork in the public domain; photograph © R6union desmus6es nationaux / Herv6 Lewandowski)

Rural HuntingThroughout his career, Courbet trumpeted his identification

with the rural customs of the Franche-Comt6, borderingSwitzerland, and his knowledge of its specific geologic won-

ders: rocky cliffs, deep valleys, dark grottoes, and subterra-nean streams. The dense forests and abundant game of theJura Mountains, suggests John Berger, encouraged the devel-

opment of the perceptual habits of a hunter."1 At the time,with hunting rights no longer reserved for the nobility, hunt-ing and poaching became common activities among the lo-

cals seeking food, profit, and recreation. Here, hunting mat-tered profoundly in physical, psychic, and material aspects oflife. As a landowner's son and aspiring artist, Courbet neverrepresented himself as an active member of the agrarian

economy, but he adopted the roles of dandy, bohemian,

duelist, lover, and hunter in the context of his native soil.Courbet's letters supply many reasons for his hunting pas-sion, which provided him with opportunities to study zoology,an excuse for violent exercise, a temporary release from the

220 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2008 VOLUME XC NUMBER 2

pressures of work, and a sense of accomplishment.12 Some-times he succumbed to compulsive poaching but found nolasting gratification in it.13 Thus, paradoxically, hunting wasboth liberating and disturbing-both a cure and the cause ofa sense of estrangement from nature. He wished to become ahunter, a vocation he deemed no less important than that ofartist. Indeed, the impulse to hunt may have sometimes over-ridden his artistic activities, as his faithful supporter andhunting companion Jules Castagnary testified: "A hunter asmuch as a painter, he interrupted a nature study more thanonce to grab his gun and shoot something down in pass-ing."' 4 Courbet bragged about his ingenuity and skill in theconquest of his prey and collected weaponry and antlers astrophies. Hunting took him back to his childhood hauntsin the wild, strengthened his bond with male companionsand family members, and expanded his social circle whenhe joined a German aristocratic hunting club in 1858 anda French imperial venery at Rambouillet in 1861.'5 ForCourbet, hunting, like the creation of art, straddled theline between autotelic and recuperative play and compet-itive sport that set specialized rules and aimed at victoryand distinction.

While hunting embodied the nuances and hierarchies ofrural life and social relationships, the promising profitabilityof the hunting genre also served as an impetus for Courbet'spainting. In a letter to Champfleury in 1860, Courbet claimedhunting pictures offer a "neutral ground where everybodyagrees" and asserted that he "will benefit from the currentvogue for landscapes and animals." 16 Hunting imagery tookon various forms in the mid-nineteenth century; highly visiblein the Salon exhibitions of painting and prints, in the deco-rative objects, children's toys, and culinary utensils of upper-and middle-class households, it also showed up in illustratedbooks and periodicals like L'Illustration and Le Magasin Pitto-resque. Contemporary caricatures by J.-J. Grandville, HonorýDaumier, and Cham addressed the popularity of the bour-geois field sport and often lampooned Parisian hunters' frus-trated and maladroit excursions into the countryside andtheir conflicts with peasants. In an age of increasing urban-ization, when animals receded into domestication as petsand zoo spectacles, Courbet, as a privileged messenger be-tween the wilderness and the city, capitalized on the tran-sience and scarcity value of nature by rendering the subject ofhunting that the urban audience had only limited opportu-nities to experience directly. In marketing his landscape andhunting images, he set aside the scandalous subjects he nor-mally chose and inevitably commodified his work, generatingdemand among dealers and collectors, fulfilling commissionsto paint hunters' portraits and animal scenes.17 To gainvisibility, he further arranged to have The Stag at Bay (Cerf al'eau) of 1861 shown in London and Baden, both of whichwere frequented by large hunting parties, and to have itsengraved reproductions distributed in England.' 8 His majorhunting scenes, though, did not appeal to hunters, his targetaudience and, as derisively predicted by critics, failed tobecome mural decorations in the dining rooms of aristocraticcastles and mansions.19 Instead, these works were either keptin his studio or acquired by dealers and collectors, whosubsequently donated or sold them to museums.

In telling contrast to Courbet's confident correspondence,

his hunting scenes sublimate the hunting instinct and subduevainglory, as if words alone were inadequate to express hisdeep-seated emotions. Do his unutterable sentiments expresswhat Champfleury called "a disinterested love of nature," asshown in his admirable representation of animals and thenatural environment?20 It is questionable that Courbet's re-lation with nature was a disinterested one, characterized bypure aesthetic appreciation or scientific observation, andwhether that is incompatible with his ethical, instrumental,and appetitive interests in nature and the cruelty, violence,and even sadomasochism implied in some of his huntingscenes. Yet if what Courbet feels for nature is love, it is impor-tant to inquire as to the mode of connection between thehuman and the animal, and what this love has to do withdesire, power, identity, and death.

A dialectic of life and death runs through the uncannyprocess Courbet employed to picture animals in huntingscenes and game pieces. He took pride in his "mathematicallyprecise" rendering of the animals' anatomy, habit, and move-ment, consciously eschewing the dramatization and senti-mentality found in the works of Horace Vernet and Sir EdwinLandseer. 21 To achieve naturalism, Courbet resorted to mak-ing sketches after carcasses from the hunt, the butcher'sstore, and taxidermy, which he equated with art.22 However,this process called for a compelling intimacy between theartist and the animals' bodies, involving gutting, skinning,dismemberment, rearticulation, and manipulation to realizecertain poses and expressions. To commemorate the cap-tured game, taxidermy and painting together erased themarks left by the killing, restoring the animal's beauty andvivacity. The creative practice enabled the artist to retrace hismemories and reconstruct his encounters with the animals towhich he attached significance. This renders Courbet's hunt-ing scenes an extension of the death ceremony in a morepoignant sense than the previous paintings that dealt withhuman death, including Burial at Ornans and Dressing for theDead Girl. While the hunting imagery was designed to bepublicly exhibited and sold in modern capitalist culture, itretained a ritual implication that became particularly mani-fest in the process of vividly reenacting the quarry's struggle,appearance, and spirit.

Beyond the Spirit of the ChaseCourbet's first life-size hunting scene, The Quarry: Deer Huntin the Forests of the Grand Jura (La curke: Chasse au chevreuil danslesforets du Grandjura, Fig. 4), exhibited at the Salon of 1857,won admiration for its technical and formal qualities of com-position but caused confusion and invited criticism for itsenigmatic and subdued treatment of the subject. Courbetplaced less emphasis on giving matter-of-fact testimony re-garding the climactic moment of the hunt than on evokingdaydreams and thoughts in the wake of cruel violence in thedepths of the pine forest. He visualized a pristine nature,unspoiled by tourism and industrialization, accessible only tonative hunters. The title gives the landscape an emphaticallylocal, cartographic specificity, and the French term la cur&epoints to the long venery tradition dating back to the MiddleAges. It refers to the ceremonial feeding of the slain animal'sentrails to the hounds, an act regarded by the French as thepeak of a hunt. The painting depicts a roe deer suspended


4 Gustave Courbet, The Quarny: Deer Hunt in the Forests of the Grand Jura, 1856, oil on canvas, 823¾4 x 72¼ in. (210.2 x 183.5 cm).Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 18.620 (artwork in the public domain; photograph @ Museum of Fine Arts,Boston)

from a tree trunk, untouched by the hounds. The deer has anindividualized face with a delicate and glistening nose, thickand felted cowlicks, and beautiful, moist eyes that gaze at us

uncannily. Courbet depicted the deer with animated brush-work, achieving a tactile materiality that is emphasized bythe interplay of the sensual surface and sagging body. The


hunter, identified as Courbet himself,23 stands with armsfolded, smoking a pipe, engrossed in musing and reverie,emotionally detached from the success of his pursuit. His gunhangs beside him, but the carving knife cannot be seen. Thehornsman, who ought to blow a fanfare to announce thedesired conclusion and increase the excitement, seems in-stead to sound a dirge for the repose of the dead. Thehounds, having received no signal to proceed with theiranticipated devouring of the entrails, appear strangely hesi-tant and restrained. As a whole, death is marked but notcelebrated. Through resistance to enacting the gory ritual,the expected fury and disorder are mastered and controlled.

The Quarry received mixed reviews at the Salon. On the onehand, it counterbalanced the adverse reception of anotherCourbet submission at the same Salon, Demoiselles on the Bankof the Seine, and established Courbet's reputation as a masterin landscape and animal paintings. Commentators ap-plauded The Quarry for its superb painterly quality, firm draw-ing, and fresh tonality, and even those critics formerly hostileto him welcomed the artist's venture into this new and "cor-rect" domain. Louis Enault considered the work the best thatthe artist had ever created.24 Jean Rousseau affirmed it to beas rich as works by Narcisse de la Pefia Diaz and as simple asthose by Constant Troyon, hence incorporating Courbet intothe more acceptable and decorous Barbizon school. 25 TheRomantic poet Thiophile Gautier commended the veracity,force, and breadth in the marvelous execution of the deer.26

On the other hand, the mysterious darkness and the figures'inertness perplexed the critics. Castagnary complained thatthe charcoal black tone in the middle ground was inexplica-ble.27 Armand Bartlet, a Besanion-based critic, voiced hispuzzlement about the two figures' lack of concern with thecur&e that should have engaged their full attention:

His figures disturb me. One is arched against a pine tree,smoking his pipe with his back turned to the scene thatshould interest him. He sleeps gently in an indifferencethat I hardly understand at the moment of a curge chaude.

The other, his cheeks puffed out in an effort to play animpossible fanfare, sleeps like his master, to whom he alsoturns his back.28

When the painting entered an American collection in 1866,a critic in Boston similarly disparaged the two men's oblivi-ousness to the scene:

The man leaning against the tree does not look as if hehad the least idea why he should be there, and the dog boywith the great brass horn suggests rather the tuning upprocess in an orchestra than anything associated with thespirit of the chase. 29

"The spirit of the chase" is precisely the essential qualitythat Courbet valued in a truly laudable hunter. That spiritembraced an experience or quality touching on physicalvigor and mental intensity, and it is evidently downplayed inthis pictorial representation. Courbet found the spirit of thehunt in the chase rather than the kill, as he wrote in a noteprepared for the publication of an illustrated history of hunt-ing in the Jura: "The abundance of game is not necessary forthose hunters who have the spirit of the hunt. A hare will be

sufficient to provide the setting and arouse the excitement ofthe pursuit."30 The spirit of the hunt is a hallmark of the true

hunter, espoused by influential hunting literature. For exam-ple, Elz6ar Blaze, a renowned captain under Napol6on I andan author of many best-selling hunting manuals, wrote thephysiognomic essay "The Hunter" for the popular compen-dium The Frenchmen Painted by Themselves, in which he ob-served the diffusion and destabilization of proper huntingtechniques and etiquette in the current vogue of bourgeoishunting. Blaze classified French hunters into three types: thetrue hunter, who displayed apt behavior, attire, and an en-during hunting spirit; the fashionable hunter, who indulgedhimself in costume and appearance to please women; and thegrocer-hunter, who killed a large quantity of game animalsfor profit. Courbet's remark suggests his thoughts were akinto Blaze's definition of the "true hunter," who hunts todeploy his body and talent and to enjoy the thrill of pursuitand combat, rather than merely acquiring the final victoryand trophy.31

Since the phrase "spirit of the chase" connotes the excite-ment, tenacity, and concentration of a worthy hunter, asuccessful pictorial translation of the spirit requires the ele-ments of movement, energy, and drama. This is evident in aspecial review in the Journal des Chasseurs-the most popularfield sports magazine of nineteenth-century France-ofhunting pictures by some twenty artists who exhibited at thesame Salon. The hunter-commentator Eugene Forest repeat-edly used the following turns of phrases to describe huntingscenes with excellent qualities: "savage [savage]," "rage andenergy [rage et entrain] ," "full of movement [pleine de mouve-ment]," "power of color [puissance de couleur]," "picturesquecostume [costume pittoresque]." Courbet's entry, The Quarry,failed to appeal to Forest's taste, as he considered the figureof the hunter too dark and the atmosphere too gloomy.3 2

Forest's judgment and rhetoric denoted the prevailing normsin criticism governing hunting imagery and reflected theexpectations of the journal's readership when it came torenderings of their favorite sport. Lacking the hunting spirit,Courbet's painting thus generated new meanings for a dif-ferent audience that exceeded the boundary of a mainstreamhunting magazine. It allowed for an integration of aestheticcontemplation and an experience of psychic repose. Perhapsthis is why The Quarry, instead of being commissioned orpurchased by any hunter, was later acquired by the art dealersVan Isachers and Jules Luquet and then sold to the AllstonClub, founded by William Morris Hunt in Boston in 1866.3•

Courbet's reinterpretation of the curne episode is antithet-ical to the typical depictions of the subject, exemplified inJadin's paintings, designed for the dining rooms of the ducd'Orl6ans's residence at the Tuileries Palace and the apart-ments of Napoleon III at the Louvre (Fig. 2). These imperialhunting scenes emphasize the sumptuous ritual attended byenergetic huntsmen, the royal entourage, and a pack ofvoracious hounds. In contrast to such spectacular climaxes ofroyal hunts, Courbet's painting activates a prolonged mo-ment of subjective reflection. The hunter's reluctance toperform the cur4e, his pipe smoking and reverie evoke a stateof mind that differs radically from the enthusiasm of trueveneurs. Consistently, Courbet's early subject is the contem-plative hunter in repose following the action of the hunt. In


5 Courbet, The Studio of the Painter: AReal Allego?y Summing Up Seven Years ofMy Artistic Life, 1854-55, oil on canvas,11 ft. 101/8 in. X 19 ft. 73/s in. (3.61 X5.98 in). Mushe d'Orsay, Paris, RF2257 (artwork in the public domain;photograph © R6union des mus6esnationaux / Herv6 Lewandowski)

1842, his earliest submissions to the Salon included a paint-ing entitled The Rest of the Hunters (now lost).34 His medal-winning work at the Salon of 1849, After Dinner at Ornans,incorporated the motif of the hunter's subjective absorp-tion-Courbet's friend Adolphe Marlet smoking and listen-ing to music-in an ambitious interior scene and in the dailyfabric of provincial life: again, the physical aggression of thehunt gives way to an aesthetic experience of music in atranquil atmosphere.

Contesting Imperial VeneryThe studied discrepancy between Courbet's painting and itstitle reflects the artist's experimentation with the divergencebetween visual image and linguistic sign by exploiting itssuggestive force. On several occasions, Courbet appropriatedthe traditional terminology of imperial venery for the titles ofhis paintings: cur&e, hallali (kill), chasse ih courre (chase huntingor running chase: using dogs and horses to chase animals toexhaustion). This titling tactic speaks to his knowledge of theroyal hunt and the public's familiarity with the terminology.With figures acting outside the conventional script, however,the paintings frustrate the viewer's expectation and operateto divest the sport of its aristocratic aura and disrupt theprescribed rules and sequence. Established elaborate proce-dures make clear that for the nobility, hunting served as acombination of practice warfare and leisure activity. ThatCourbet reworked traditional terminology and motifs in hisrepresentations of rural hunting may be read as an attempt toclaim hunting rights for the provinces. Throughout eigh-teenth-century Europe, hunting rights were closely guardedby the gentry and contested by the peasantry, and poaching(braconnage) constituted a prevalent form of social protest.After the French Revolution, the hunting privileges of thenoble elite were abolished along with other aspects of feu-dalism, and poaching was redefined as a property crime. Thestate designed a permit system in the 1830s to combat theproblem and, in May 1844, with the preservation of game inview, prohibited commoners and aristocracy from huntingwhen the ground was covered with snow.35 Nonetheless, in

rural areas like the Jura Mountains, poaching, regarded as alegitimate activity, was carried out on a vast scale in spite ofstate surveillance and penalties, because hunting fulfilledimportant dietary, economic, and social functions for localpopulations. 36 Courbet himself showed scant regard for thelaw, frequently poaching or taking poaching as the subject ofhis paintings, and his emphatic insistence on independencefrom the government remained a central part of his artisticand political stance.

Courbet's critical distance from imperial hunting practicemay be discerned in his earlier manifesto painting The Studioof the Painter: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of MyArtistic Life (Fig. 5). According to Klaus Herding, Courbetadvocates a natural vision in the center of the composition asa promise of social reconciliation and regeneration and, onthe occasion of the Exposition Universelle, enacts an exhor-tation to Napol6on III, who is present in the guise of ahunter, alluding to his passion for the hunt and his politicalnickname "poacher."37 The prominent emperor-hunter, withhis rifle and elegant hounds, was thereby relegated to whatCourbet referred to as "the world of trivial life, the people,misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, andthe people who live off of death," 38 as opposed to the realmof those cultural producers and art supporters who live onlife, found on the right side of the canvas. To enhance theirsocial supremacy and retain the lineage of the ancien r6gime,the court of Napol6on III was keen on the revival of theimperial venery in forest reserves, the keeping of records ofkills, the advancement of arms, and the collection of tro-phies.39 As if to counteract the presence of the emperor-hunter, Courbet portrays himself in an Assyrian beard thatbespeaks the noted hunting prowess of the kings of Ninevehand Nimrud. By painting a native landscape, Courbet stressedhis affective bond with his hometown and proffered thepristine natural environment as a site of liberty and renewal.His hunting pictures of the next decade ask how modernmen might be reintegrated into nature, though they are far

from an idyllic arcadia devoid of internal tensions or contra-dictions.


6 Courbet, The Hunting Picnic, 1858, oil on canvas, 81½ X 128 in. (207 X 325 cm). Wallraf-Richartz-Museum-Fondation Corboud,Cologne (artwork in the public domain; photograph © the Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne)

The Melancholy HunterThe Quarty reveals no happy harmony between humanity andthe animate natural world; the hunter's dissociation with theclimax and the delicate rendering of the deer's carcass pointinstead to sentiments of regret and guilt over the masteringof nature. Rousseau's philosophy on the redemptive force ofnature inspired generations of Romantic artists and exertedan ongoing impact on intellectual concerns about midcen-tury, particularly in the Franche-Comt6. Scholars have dem-onstrated that Rousseau's identification of the natural withthe good informed Courbet's The Studio of the Painter andlandscape paintings, and it was ardently followed by hisfriends Thor6 and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. 40 It can be fur-ther argued that Rousseau's view on animals reverberates inCourbet's hunting scenes. As a result of his natural feelingsand education, Rousseau's tmile enjoys a peaceful spirit andnever seeks pleasure in domination and in the suffering ofanimals. 41 Rousseau's critique of hunting and advocacy ofsympathy for the plight of animals remained a potent influ-ence on the movements promoting animal protection andvegetarianism in the nineteenth century.42 Alphonse deLamartine, one of Courbet's favorite Romantic writers, 43 em-braced Rousseau's compassionate attitude toward animalsand devoted himself to defending animal welfare and writinghumanitarian and zoophilic literature. In 1855, he publisheda widely circulated piece of prose entitled "La mort d'unchevreuil" (The Death of a Deer), in which he provided a

detailed account of why he, as a hunter's son, resolved toabandon hunting. He further gave a dramatic reading of thistext at the annual meeting of the Soci6t& Protectrice desAnimaux (Animal Protection Society) in 1855 and received amedal of honor from the society. Moved by the dying deer'stearful and soulful eyes, Lamartine expressed his remorseand questioned the morality of hunting. 44 Courbet's TheQuarry similarly underscores the deer's sorrowful eyes, whichlook out at the viewer. There appears to be an affinity be-tween the painting and Lamartine's prose, although it is notcertain that Courbet was acquainted with the latter. He hadread Lamartine's work zealously in his college years and oftenmet the republican writer in the hangouts of literary bohe-mians, such as the Brasserie des Martyrs, during the SecondEmpire. In 1863, he thought of painting the impoverishedLamartine with beggar's wallet and lyre in his enigmaticSource of Hippocrene, which he foretold would be an "epicpainting, a serious though comical satire.

Despite Courbet's admiration for Lamartine, he never for-sook hunting; as he continued his commitment to the sub-ject, however, he confronted its aftereffects. The mood ofmelancholy and mystery and the beautiful body and eyes of adead deer reappear in Courbet's sizable painting The HuntingPicnic, of 1858 (Fig. 6). The motif of the "repas de chasse"refers to the meal before or after the hunt, or between tworounds of chase, and it normally depicts a hedonistic fetegalante, as shown in the royal hunting parties by such Rococo


artists asJean Franýois de Troy (1679-1752), Nicolas Lancret(1690-1743), and Carle Van Loo (1705-1765) (Fig. 7). Pop-ular painters of the Second Empire, like Jadin and PhilippeRousseau, emulated this mode of celebrating a cordial ambi-ence and amorous liaisons in their representations of hunt-ing picnics. In Courbet's version, a collective alienation andmelancholy replace the high spirits and sensual delight an-ticipated by the title. The pile of mixed game-deer, hare,partridge-at the lower right occupies a significant propor-tion of the composition and presses forward to the viewer. Itconveys the meditative meaning of nature morte and vanitasinstead of serving as the object of gourmet consumption. Thegame animals are united in death, their flaccid bodies distin-guishable from the firm bodies of the two dogs nearby, yettheir proximity and the rich textures and sheens on their furand pelt suggest an eerie threshold between sleep and death.Dogs frequently function as a liaison between the quarry andthe hunter, putting into relief the different uses and catego-ries of animals. The dining utensils are ready, but nobody isin the mood to enjoy the picnic, or even conversation. Thetwo women in similarly styled sporting outfits, together withtheir male companions, are absorbed in the horn music andtheir own musings. Adding to the vague unease is the impres-sion that the figures do not quite belong in their space, as ifthey withhold themselves from their environment as well asfrom one another. The pictorial arrangement evokes a ten-sion between the flat surface of the canvas and the construc-tion of this particular landscape, with its sunlit chalk cliffs, aclear stream, and a bright blue sky. It is not the geographiclocation or weather conditions so much as the psychic terri-tory the figures inhabit that dominates the mood. The paint-ing stands apart from long-held associations of the huntingpicnic with gastronomic enjoyment and erotic adventure,featuring instead the enigmatic psychology of the individualsand the effect of musical transposition.

A sense of prolonged waiting and the hunter's state ofpensive absorption recur in Hunter on Horseback, Recovering theTrail of 1864 (Fig. 8). This is another self-portrait depictinga hunter who hesitates to bring the violent sport to a conclu-sion.4 6 The succinct composition with minimal descriptivedetails invites multiple readings that do not add up to anyclear, definite narrative. The wintry mountain is charged withan uncanny effect of silence and solitude, intensified by thetextures and tones of white and gray. The snow signals thatthe hunt is out of season, and the hunter is thus poaching.The title implies a horse-riding hunter who had become lostin the wild, returning to his path with the help of his horse,but the painting provides few clues to his destination, hisprey, or the progress of his chase. One may wonder whyinstead of eagerly going forward to capture the animal he haswounded, the hunter, looking melancholy, slows down andcontemplates the bloodstains and hoofprints in the snow.Courbet chose to focus on an unusual moment of inhibitedmovement and forge a metaphoric space outside the conven-tional hunting sequence. He transformed the stereotypicalrustic, boorish hunter into a mourner who seeks to makepeace with the wounded animal. The hunter, through affec-tive imagination, shares the suffering and fear of the quarry,which leaves its bodily traces on the snow and haunts thelandscape. By an exceptional economy of means, in the ab-

7 Carle Van Loo, A Halt during the Hunt, 1737, oil on canvas,86% X 983/8 in. (220 X 250 cm). Mus6e du Louvre, Paris, 6279(artwork in the public domain; photograph © R6union desmus6es nationaux / Hervr Lewandowski)

sence of the game, hounds, weapon, and action, the paintingmaps the psychology of hunting at the temporal arrest of theanticipation of death and deferred satisfaction. The intro-spective self-image utterly diverges from Courbet's bombasticletters, which dwell on his elation and triumph in the chaseand the anatomical and ballistic analysis of the kill. 47 Insteadof straightforwardly documenting a hunt, art fulfills the workof mourning as an imaginary reparation and reconciliation.

The elegiac quality of the painting corresponds to a curi-ous passage in Courbet's notes for the aborted project of anillustrated history of rural hunting, wherein he mused, "Thehunter is a man of independent character, who has a freemind or at least the sentiment of freedom. He is a woundedsoul, with a heart that nurses his languor in the vaguenessand melancholy of the forest.'"48 Leaving aside the commonbiological and cultural defenses of hunting, these words re-veal a subjectivity very different from that of most hunters, ofwhom Elzear Blaze, in his article "The Hunter," identifiedthree main types. Courbet argued that hunting is an activityliberated from social constraints and symbolic domination.The hunter merges with Courbet's self-image of an indepen-dent artist who lives the life of an inner exile and savorsfreedom, idleness, and daydreams in the natural wilderness.He resembles a Romantic noble half savage, a poet with agun, roaming the forest and brimming with bittersweet long-ings. But the hunter's inclination toward languor and idle-ness is something that venery authorities, such as the influ-ential medieval Count Gaston Ph&bus (1331-1391), had longdenounced.4 9 In fact, from Plato to Xenophon and RobertBurton (1577-1640), hunting has been recommended toenhance men's pleasure and health and to combat idlenessand cure melancholy. 50 The noted naturalist comte de Buf-fon (1707-1788) also claimed hunting as the only amuse-ment capable of providing complete diversion from work andvivacious pleasure without causing languor or satiation.3 '


8 Courbet, Hunter on Horseback,Recovering the Trail, 1864, oil oncanvas, 47 X 371/2 in. (119.4 X 95.3cm). Yale University Art Gallery, NewHaven, gift of J. Watson Webb andElectra Havemeyer Webb (artwork inthe public domain; photographprovided by Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY)

Courbet's conception of the hunter deviates from main-

stream opinions on the invigorating and recreational benefits

of the hunt, gravitating toward a torpid and melancholy state.In his writings, Courbet displays ambivalence about the

rationale for hunting. On the one hand, he celebrated hunt-ing as a national heritage and a natural way for men to make

use of their talent, instinct, and energy.52 On the other hand,

by depicting the hunter as a wounded soul, Courbet pre-

sented him as a traumatized victim rather than an agent of

violence and aggression. His lack of vitality and interest ap-

proaches the state of renunciation and self-denigration in-flicted by melancholia. Sigmund Freud described melancho-

lia as "an open wound," an internalization of and identifica-

tion with the loss of a loved object, a pathological mourn-ing.53 The sense of self for the hunter, as for Freud's melan-

cholic, can be characterized by a convoluted and ongoingnegotiation with pain and loss. The downcast hunter, more-

over, who perceives the animate and inanimate aspects of the

natural world is conflated with the long-standing trope of the

melancholy artist who claims genius, creativity, and a pro-

found insight into the essence of things and the universe.In nineteenth-century France, hunting was considered a

rite of passage to manhood, important for character building,physical training, and a gentleman's education. 54 Rather than

portraying the embodiment of invulnerable manhood-amasculinity courageously asserting itself in the face of grave

challenge and danger-The Quarry and Hunter on Horsebackdispel the masculine mystique of virile robustness, leaving

behind the external image of the hunter in order to recoverthe interior self. Manhood was for Courbet a fraught and

fragile aspiration rather than an accomplished fact.55 Alreadyin early works like The Man with a Leather Belt, The Cellist, and

The Wounded Man, his self-portraits express a sensitive andintrospective persona. Courbet appeared in diverse roles inhis paintings, affirming both his uniqueness and the mobilityof the self. These multifarious self-portraits represent contin-

gent and competing conceptions of masculinity and trace theintersection of subjectivity and social reality in a retrospective


9 Courbet, After the Hunt, ca. 1859, oilon canvas, 93 X 731¼ in. (236.2 X186.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museumof Art, New York, bequest of Mrs.H. 0. Havemeyer, 1929, H. 0. Have-meyer Collection (artwork in thepublic domain; image U The Metro-politan Museum of Art / ArtResource, NY)

light. He called them an "autobiography" subject to hischanging attitudes. 56 Inaugurated by Rousseau's Confessionsas a project of self-revelation and self-justification, modernautobiography often involves omission and interpretation,situated somewhere between real events and embellishmentsof memory and imagination. Through painting in the con-fessional mode, art exonerates and redeems the artist; itunburdens him of his wrongs and promises him liberation.Courbet's hunting imagery can be seen as inheriting thetraditional function of confession that offers emancipatoryand transformative agency. Similarly, the prehistoric cavepaintings in Lascaux, as Georges Bataille interpreted them,were conduits of the hunter-painter's confession and hisattempt to communicate with the wounded animals. In ad-dressing the animal, the human predator asks forgivenessfrom the slain animal in order to relieve his remorse whennext he hunts.

5 7

One of the most striking innovations of Courbet's huntingseries is its adoption of a variety of forms of expression to

convey the protean quality of his engagement with the natu-ral world. In his extended essay on hunters' reactions to thedeaths of animals, Courbet described the asymmetrical powerrelations between hunters and their quarries, which arousecomplex feelings of fear, sadism, and empathy. In After theHunt (Fig. 9), a composition of a forest interior similar to TheQua•ry, a fashionable hunter with vibrant blond hair smilinglyraises a dead fox as a plaything with which to tease thehounds and reinforce their aggressive instincts, yet the whipin his right hand may be used to restrain them. This mischie-vous act, not without a macabre sense of humor, simulta-neously assuages any disquiet about mortality induced by thehaunted, claustrophobic woods. With his delight and hisassociation with the royal hunt, as suggested by his tight andcolorful costume, the youth constitutes an exception in Cour-bet's hunting series. The proximity of living and dead ani-mals-boar, deer, hare, partridge, fox-evokes a liminalstate between sentience and insentience. The dogs' attack onthe fox, whose uncannily animated face contrasts with its


10 Courbet, The German Huntsman,1859, oil on canvas, 471/4 X 69 in.(120 X 175 cm). Mus6e des Beaux-Arts, Lons-le-Saunier, no. 188, gift ofJean-Paul Mazaroz, 1886 (artwork inthe public domain; photograph byJean-Loup Mathieu, studio Eureka)

docile, sagging body, demonstrates the conflict between spe-cies and offers a defense of hunting on the basis of instinct.Placed within touching distance, the abundant items of gameput on display, painted with forceful effects of modeling andforeshortening, vie with one another for the viewer's atten-tion. Their tangible immediacy makes it hard to discriminateamong the different animal bodies and presents an unset-tling viewing experience.5

8

Trope of the Noble StagCourbet initiated a series of paintings centering on the stag'ssuffering, struggle, and death with The German Huntsman(Fig. 10), whose title alludes to his hunting experience inFrankfurt in 1858. It was one of fourteen paintings exhibitedat the Exposition Universelle in Besanion in 1860 and sold toJean-Paul Mazaroz. An industrial sculptor, furniture maker,and art collector in the Franche-Comt6, Mazaroz shared withthe artist a political radicalism tinged with Fourierism,Charles Fourier's utopian socialism that proposed the liber-ation of human passions and a community ofjoyous labor.59

The composition gives a strong sense of the close-up andobtrusive presence of the hunter and stag near a stream inthe forest. It illuminates the facts that hunting is a deliberate,direct, and violent killing of wild animals and that the hunteris an armed yet liminal figure who stands on the very bound-ary between the human domain and the wilderness. Theviewer is compelled to take account of the dramatic confron-tation in which the hunter feels awestruck by the quarry'sglistening eyes, formidable defenses, and noble agony. Thestag's majestic body is turned upside down in an abject statethat makes its gasping face and antlers-souvenirs of victoryand emblems of maleness-even more prominent. It is amoment of intersubjective recognition wherein the animalcan function for the hunter as both alter ego and inevitableother. Courbet accentuates the suffering of the animal and

endows it with quasi-human heroism and martyrdom.Courbet's recurrent choice of the stag as hero resonates

with historical and allegorical meanings, elevating the hunt-ing genre to the status of a grand history painting. He depictsthe stag's sexuality and combats during the rutting season inthe epic canvas Battle of the Stags (also known as The Spring

Rut), which he thought should have had the same impact asBurial at Ornans.60 He portrays the stag's inconsolable woe atthe end of a six-hour chasse a courre in The Stag at Bay. Both ofthese paintings received unprecedented, unanimous admira-tion at the Salon of 1861 for their masterful rendering of themagnificent animals and somber landscape. The symbolicelevation of deer to noble status, which derived in part fromthe heightened restriction of deer-hunting privileges to thearistocracy, exerted a powerful influence on Western atti-tudes toward hunting. In Ph&bus's Le livre de chasse (The Bookof the Hunt), stag hunting is upheld as the noblest form ofhunt, for in it, the art of hunting finds its best expression. 61

The comte de Buffon praised the stag hunt as a model ofphysical exercise and courage building, supportive of military

training.62 Many hunting manuals have endowed the stagwith strength, cunning, and valor, making it a worthy antag-onist and ideal quarry. Before the French Revolution, thehunting of stags and other large game was a guarded feudalprerogative. Courbet's initiation into the formalized pursuit

of the stag took place when he was invited to participate inaristocratic hunts in Frankfurt and Rambouillet. His paint-ings, however, undermined the courtly and military over-tones of the stag hunt and stressed the landscape of the Juraas the setting for the tragic fall of the prey.

Courbet addressed the social and psychic realities of con-temporary rural hunting practice in the context of the long-held literary and artistic conventions of the stag. For manydevoted hunters, stag hunting connotes something largerand more mysterious than merely the pursuit of food andpleasure. The stag's antlers, which are annually shed and

regrown, give rise to the creature's symbolic association withrebirth, rejuvenation, and male sexual potency in general.63

The iconography of the stag, moreover, can be traced back to

Christian art, which tells the stories of Saints Eustace andHubert, who were converted while hunting on meeting a stagwith a crucifix hovering between its antlers. In medieval andRenaissance allegory, the stag was symbolic of prudence,swiftness, longevity, renewal, and love. 64 English and GermanRomantic poets used the uncanny-looking white deer as ametaphor to summon otherworldliness, transcendence, andromance.6, For Courbet, the stag is probably overlaid withsome of these positive qualities transmitted through centuriesof cultural history. He sought to rework traditional allegoriesinto modern history paintings, grounded in his concreteexperience, situated knowledge, and current social attitudestoward animals and hunting.

Natural History and the Animal Protection MovementCourbet's revision of the hunting genre was tied to thediscourse of republican-inflected and evolutionary naturalhistory and the conflict between ideologies supportive ofeither hunting or animal protection. As Courbet's landscapepaintings are informed by the naturalistJean-Baptiste Lamarck'stransformisme, which stressed the dynamic and continual changeof nature,66 his view of animals may imply his concurrence withLamarck's progressive zoology, which was popular at the time,especially in republican circles. Radical in his exclusion ofreligion and metaphysics, Lamarck argued that human be-ings were merely one species among the many that naturehad produced and that instinct and intelligence were sharedby both humans and animals. In his Philosophie zoologique(Zoological Philosophy) of 1809 Lamarck contended thatenvironment affected the shape and biological makeup ofanimals and that each species acquired new habits and amore complicated organic structure in response to changingcircumstances. 67 Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, writtenin 1859, was translated into French by Cl0mence Royer in1862, and the impact of Darwinism was largely accommo-dated within the native French Lamarckian tradition. Darwinthought that the process of natural selection, without divineplanning, could have brought about the evolution of allorganisms from a few ancestral forms toward corporeal andmental perfection. 68 In The Descent of Man and The Expressionof Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin conceded that formsof subjectivity and emotional intelligence were present inboth humans and animals. Nonetheless, he continued toshoot animals for sport, revealing a competitive and hier-archical conception of nature. Unfortunately, the Darwin-ian vision later served to justify European imperialism andthe mythic stereotype of the "Great White Hunter" in thecolonies.

69

In the mid-nineteenth century, writing natural history wasa means of writing metaphorically about society, its problemsand its hopes. Significant texts by socialist utopian and hunt-ing enthusiast Alphonse Toussenel (1803-1885) and the re-publican historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) probably con-tributed to shaping Courbet's vision of animals in relation tothe human condition. Toussenel, who frequented a literaryand artistic group at Bougival whose members includedCourbet, Camille Corot, and Henri Murger, authored thebook L'esprit des bMtes: VMnerie ftanfaise et zoologie passionnelle(The Spirit of Animals: French Venery and Passionate Zool-ogy), which was widely read and appreciated by the carica-


turist J.-J. Grandville and writers like Gautier and CharlesBaudelaire. He described the habitat, diet, and behavior of agiven species and assessed its value in the eyes of a committedhunter. Then he applied the Fourierist idea of universalanalogy, which regarded animals and humans alike as mani-festations of the divine message, and interpreted the animalsas symbols of human vice and virtue: for example, the stagembodied loyalty, the pig avarice. Thus, he classified animalsin terms of moral qualities and objected to received forms oftaxonomy.70 His treatise on hunting and its problems, Tristia:Histoire des mis&res et des fleaux de la chasse de France (Sadness:History of Miseries and Plagues of Hunting in France), insiststhat hunting was a man's natural right and heroic act butcriticizes contemporary hunting as a debased middle-classpastime, a commercial and industrial activity, too full ofcarnage and without mercy. A true hunter, he contends,understands and respects his quarry.71 An admirer ofToussenel, Michelet went further, combining the field ofnatural history with animal welfare concerns, republican pol-itics, and evolutionary science. In Lepeuple (The People), thebest-known piece of French Romantic zoophilia, he held thatanimals were victims of oppression who merited justice, notsimply pity.

72 The goal of history and nature alike is therealization of universal peace and harmony among classesand species. He wrote in L'oiseau (The Bird), "All the livingspecies, each in its humble right, came knocking at the doorand claiming admittance to the bosom of democracy."73

Michelet supported the Soci&t6 Protectrice des Animaux andurged the public to restore a primordial pact with animalsand to abandon the destruction of innocent creatures forpleasure.

By the mid-nineteenth century, public opinion was grow-ing intolerant of animal abuse, and animal protection was onits way to becoming accepted as prevailing thought. TheSoci6t6 Protectrice des Animaux, founded under the leader-ship of Dr. ttienne Pariser in 1845, worked on the civilizinggoal of reforming popular attitudes toward animals and suc-cessfully promoted the enactment of the Grammont law in1850, which outlawed acts of cruelty toward domestic animalsin public.7 4 In 1855, its Bulletin de Soci6te Protectrice des Animauxpublished antihunting prose by Lamartine. In 1867, the so-ciety's bulletin contained an essay on the Salon paintingsentitled "Les animaux aux Salons de peinture," which de-plored the lack of any treatment by the visual arts of thetheme of animal welfare, when that cause had inspired manyliterary works. Nonetheless, as tlisabeth Hardouin-Fugier in-dicated, visual representations of animal suffering were con-sidered a cultural taboo and a drawback in the art market atthe time.75 From 1864 on, the number of architects (Charles-Jules S6dille, Paul S6dille, Laforge, Frangois Thierry-La-grange), painters (L,on Cogniet, Mme Noggerath, Mine deRequin), photographers (Nadar), and sculptors (F. Louat)who joined the society steadily increased. However, a com-mitment to animal protection was not synonymous with op-position to hunting, for the humane society's members in-cluded Rosa Bonheur, animal painter and avid huntress, andJules G6rard, the noted "killer of lions [tueur de lions]Wy76

Probably because of the social prestige of hunters, polemicsagainst hunting were generally inhibited in comparison withthose against the abuse of animals.


11 Courbet, The Death of the Stag, Episode of Chase Hunting in a Snowy Terrain, 1867, oil on canvas, 11 ft. 73/4 in. X 16 ft. 6¾/4 in.(3.55 X 5.05 m). Mus6e des Beaux-Arts et d'Arch&ologie, Besangon (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Charles Choffet,© Mus6e des Beaux-Arts et d'Arch6ologie, Besanoon)

Ethical Dilemma in Experiential RealismThe paradox of the hunter's appreciation and destruction ofanimals and his identification with and objectification of thequarry is suggested in the sublime painting The Death of theStag, Episode of Chase Hunting in a Snowy Terrain (Hallali ducerf, episode de chasse d courre sur un terrain de neige, Fig. 11). Itis Courbet's final major painting devoted to the hunt and thelast canvas of such an imposing size in his oeuvre. Courbethad conceived the project in 1865 and believed it exerted"great artistic importance" and had a profound impact on hisreputation. 77 During these years he was plagued by vehementcriticism of his paintings, such as Portrait of Pierre-Joseph Prou-dhon in 1853 and Woman with a Parrot, and he relied on thesuccess of his landscape and animal images to compensate forthe decline in his critical and economic fortunes. A photo-graph of Courbet at work on the composition shows the stagas a strange mirror image of the hunter-artist. The sufferingstag, with its magnificent antlers in profile against the snowysky, becomes the ideal opponent of the hunter and themanifestation of the human subconscious.

The term hallali is an abbreviation of allez d lui, which refersto the moment of the kill after the prey has been run down,long an exclusive right of the nobility. In his final rendition of

1867 Courbet's protagonists are the haut bourgeois-repre-

sented by his friends and collectors-in his native region,their social position legitimating their exercise of the classicalhunt. The Ornans distiller Jules Cuisenier posed as thehunter wielding a whip to restrain the hounds, rather thanblowing the horn to encourage them. His long and forcefulwhip is frozen in the air, and the suspense produces a strongvisceral effect on the viewer. His action shows the habitualflogging involved in the training and running of dogs. Thelandowner and politician F6lix Gaudy posed as the hunter onhorseback, who watches the scene with composure and com-prehension, clothed in plush animal skin as a token of hishunting feats and social status. His posture is reminiscent ofthe hunter in the rear of Peter Paul Rubens's Fox and WolfHunt and the Turkish soldier in Delacroix's Scenes from theMassacres at Chios, both of whom connote authority andseverity. 78 Although this debt to the renowned works of thepast demonstrates that Courbet inscribed himself withinan art historical continuum, the solemn atmosphere anddisciplined structure of the painting decisively distance itfrom the vibrant coloring and chaotic melee of its Baroqueand Romantic precedents. Courbet depicted both men asconsummate hunters, possessing the virtues of endurance

and courage and convinced that humanity holds dominionover the animals. The Romantic conception of the melan-choly hunter who longs to commune with nature gives wayto a superior type of hunter, an insistent defender of theelaborate hunting ritual, the strict hierarchy and bound-aries of the animal kingdom.

In the tactile drama of capture, Courbet paid homage tothe hunted animal, whose anguish evokes sacrifice and mar-tyrdom. This emphasis on the creature's noble death coun-teracts the hunters' supremacy and glory and engages theviewer's moral understanding. The stag is incapable of fur-ther resistance against the onslaught of the hungry hounds,but it still holds its head erect, struggling heroically at theend, even as it senses its imminent doom. The bodies of thedogs and the stag express their sensations and emotions moreeloquently than the corporeal signs of the hunters. Thehounds, individualized in their posture, movement, and phys-iognomy, are all bony and undernourished. The compositionis saturated with various pitches of voices-the chilling bellowof the prey and the excited baying of the hounds-that in-tertwine with the visual, physical, and mental activity of eachanimal. The pristine hues of the snowy terrain dominate thepictorial field, its radiant whites executed with a flourish ofthe dense materiality of the paint. The setting delineates anarena for the combat between men and animals, turning thekill into a performance of aggression and torture. It is in-tended to stir the viewer's sympathy for the suffering animal,fear in the face of the annihilation of life, and indignationagainst the chase hunting practice.

The Death of the Stag proved to be the most criticized ofCourbet's hunting series. Critics at the Salon of 1869 haddifficulty finding words to justify the cruelty of the hunt, oreven to endorse the reality of the pictorial evocation. As anavant-garde history painting, The Death of the Stag raises anethical dilemma within the context of an aesthetic experi-ence. Castagnary, an ardent hunter himself, was the onlycommentator who managed to praise so much as the beautyof its colors and drawing, along with its exceptional grandeur,force, and verity.79 Paul Casimir-P6rier, however, denouncedthe distasteful, warlike turmoil in the hunting scene. Heironically described it as "the Battle of Eylau in the kennel,"capable only of attracting the proud hunters and dog trainersand destined for the collections at the chAtteaux. He doubtedthe art public would be interested in a painting so deficient inpoetry and thoughtfulness.80 Still other critics chided theinfidelity to nature, which, they deemed, ruined the artist'sreputation as a principal Realist. Charles Blanc, who hadchampioned the revival of Desportes's and Oudry's splendidhunting pictures, claimed that nothing could be less realistthan this rebarbative painting, but he gave no reason for theperceived absence of realism.,s Albert Wolff found fault withthe unconvincing anatomy of the mounted hunter, whoseemed to resemble a circus acrobat with extraordinary equi-librium.8 2 Gautier, who had dealt with the subject of animalprotection in his Caprices et zigagsa3 and had affirmed themerits of The Quarry in 1857, denigrated The Death of the Stagas a fantasy, lacking the realism of perspective and snoweffects as well as the furious movement and violent style ofRubens's epic hunts. He went on to identify the fundamentalproblem as an overly large canvas for the light subject of rural


hunting.8 4 In summary, these seemingly contradictory opin-

ions highlight the painting's three main shortcomings: theinappropriate conflation of the grand format and the ruralscene; the inadequate optical realism of the figures, perspec-tive, and landscape; and the excessive experiential realism ofthe brute physicality of the hunt.

The negative reception testifies to the infeasibility of Cour-bet's initial hope that the hunting subject might become a"neutral ground where everybody agrees." In fact, after beingshown at Courbet's solo exhibition in 1867 and the Salon of1869, The Death of the Stag remained in the artist's studio untilthe end of his career and was not acquired by the Besanýonmuseum until the auction of 1881. Far from an anodynecelebration of the venery tradition, its unflinching stress onanimal suffering disconcerted the nonhunting audience andchallenged the urban bourgeois standard of humane behav-ior. Nevertheless, it is a thoughtfully crafted composition thatdemonstrates Courbet's experimentation with compositionalstructure and tonal nuances, and in it, his intense emotionalinvestment in the subject takes on cathartic meaning.

In conclusion, the hunting genre long served to glorifyroyal privileges and human dominance and to afford thesensual pleasures of violent spectacle. Courbet, refusing tobow to received precepts of its representation, revised thegenre into a vehicle for profound self-inquiry, involving issuesof gender, class, and artistic identity. Combining naturalistic,psychological, and ethical implications, his hunting picturesforged a new kind of history painting as an interchangebetween artistic subjectivity, lived experience, and social atti-tudes toward animals. Courbet worked in a milieu in whichthe popularity of bourgeois sport hunting was rising andimperial venery was reviving, while the animal protectionmovement coalesced and the attacks on hunting and animalabuse intensified. As a nature-loving hunter and devotedrepublican, his heightened attention to the exterior andinterior life of animals accrued associations with the evolu-tionary ideas of Lamarck and Darwin, the zoophilic senti-ments of Lamartine, Toussenel, and Michelet, as well as theestablished trope of the noble stag. In nature he found notonly solace and relief but also a sphere of activity in which he,too, engaged in the cruelty and injustice of the hunt. In hisart, he transformed the warlike hunt into an ambivalent taleof loss and a symptom of human depravity. His paintings andwritings oscillate between complex masculine attitudes to-ward nature- domination, benevolence, guilt-and longingfor an intimacy with the primordial animal world. The resultis a compelling art that explores how modern men bothmaintain an adventurous outdoor life and seek to communeon peaceful terms with animals under conditions of mutualliberty. Ultimately, the ambition, passion, and heroism of thehunt are transferred to the art of painting in its power tocritique conventions, provide consolation for loss, and imag-ine a better, harmonious relation between the civilized andthe natural worlds.

Shao-Chien Tseng (PhD, University of Iowa) is associate professor of arthistory at the National Central University in Taiwan. Her researchfocuses on nineteenth-century French art and contemporary art. Thisarticle is part of a larger project on natural history and the visual arts


[Graduate Institute ofArt Studies, National Central University, JhongliCity, Taoyuan County 320, Taiwan, [email protected]].

NotesDifferent versions of this article have been presented at the internationalconference "Heroes: Hero Worship and Image-Making in Art," organized bythe Project of Western Art History Studies in Taipei, October 2005, and at theSchool of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa, April 2006. I amgrateful to Timothy Murray, Thomas Gaehtgens, Gregor Wedekind, KerstinThomas, and Wallace Tomasini for their astute comments and to JeffreyCuvilier for his editorial assistance. I am especially indebted to DorothyJohnson for her generous guidance and to The Art Bulletin's RichardJ. Powelland Lory Frankel and anonymous readers for their insightful suggestions. Myresearch has been partly funded by the National Science Council of Taiwanand my illustrations by the latter and the College Art Association. Unlessotherwise noted, translations are mine.

1. Courbet mentioned his dreams of animals and country meals when hewas a resident student at the Collbge Royal de Besanion; see GustaveCourbet, "Au CollMge de Besanýon," in Courbet, racontO par lui-mnme etpar ses amis, ed. Pierre Courthion, 2 vols. (Geneva: P. Cailler, 1948),vol. 1, 34.

2. Courbet to Champfleury, Paris, June 1863, in Letters of Gustave Courbet,trans. and ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1992), 224.

3. ThMophile Thorh, "Salon de 1861," in Salons de W. Burger, 1861 a 1868(Paris: Renouard, 1870), vol. 1, 36; and Francis Wey, "Notre maitrepeintre Gustave Courbet," in Courbet, raconte par lui-meme, vol. 1, 193.

4. Linda Nochlin, "The Development and Nature of Realism in the Workof Gustave Courbet: A Study of the Style and Its Social and ArtisticBackground" (PhD diss., New York University, 1963), 223-25. In a re-cent article, "Courbet and His Territory: How Landscape Means," inidem, Courbet (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007), chap. 11, Noch-lin adjusted her position by addressing the sociopolitical. and gendermeanings of Courbet's landscapes. See T. J. Clark, Image of the People:Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, 2nd ed. (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1982), 10, 78, 132; and Anne Wagner, "Courbet'sLandscapes and Their Market," Art Histoiy 4, no. 4 (December 1981):410-31.

5. For the link between Courbet's landscapes and evolutionary science,see Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, "It Took Millions of Years to ComposeThat Picture," in Courbet Reconsidered, exh. cat., ed. Sarah Faunce andLinda Nochlin (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1989), chap. 4.For Courbet's seminal role in the development of topographical land-scape prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century, see Greg M. Thomas,"The Topographical Aesthetic in French Tourism and Landscape,"Nineteenth-Centmoy Art Worldwide 1 (Spring 2002), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring-02/articles/thom.html. For a sociopoliticalinterpretation of Courbet's landscape painting, see Klaus Herding,Courbet: To Venture Independence, trans. John W. Gabriel (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1991), 62-98. For phenomenological readings,see Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1990), chaps. 5, 6; and Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Touch," in Soiland Stone: Impressionism, Urbanism, Environment, ed. Frances Fowle andRichard Thomson (Hants, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003), 17-32. For a readingof The Painter's Studio in Rousseauian terms, see Dan Guernsey, "Child-hood and Aesthetic Education: The Role of Emile in the Formation ofGustave Courbet's The Painter's Studio," in Picturing Children: Construc-tions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud, ed. Marilyn Brown (Hants,U.K.: Ashgate, 2002), 71-88. A recent exhibition devoted to Courbet'slandscape painting emphasized the artist's groundbreaking techniquesand pictorial inventiveness as a precursor to modernist painting. SeeMary Morton and Charlotte Eyerman, Courbet and the Modern Landscape(Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006).

6. Herding, Courbet: To Venture Independence, 84-88. Although the human-animal analogy was common in the contemporary literature, it is im-portant to consider the widespread appeal of natural history that viewsanimals as having an existence in themselves, and Courbet's objectionto the anthropomorphic interpretation of his animal paintings. JamesRubin pointed out the ethical overtone in the hunting scenes; see hisGustave Courbet (London: Phaidon, 1997), 234. The following are re-cent studies of Courbet's hunting pictures: Sten Ake Nilsson, "GustaveCourbet and the Mirror of Death," Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stock-holm 6 (1992): 62-65, briefly mentions Courbet's hunting scenes as amemorial to his hunting experience; Sarah Faunce, Gustave Courbet(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 31-33, 84, 100, argues that Cour-bet was "probably the most convincing and sympathetic animal painterworking in the nineteenth century" (33); and Val6rie Bajou, "Portraitde Fartiste en chasseur," in Gustave Courbet (Paris: Adam Biro, 2003),

271-89, describes the tragic pathos of the fallen stag in several paint-ings.

7. Kerstin Thomas, "La mise en schne du sauvage: Gustave Courbet et lachasse," Romantisme 129 (Fall 2005): 79-96. In contrast, I am con-cerned with how Courbet's paintings depart from the type of thehunter as wild man and from the convention of the royal hunt.

8. See Pierre Jacky, Alexandre-Franfois Desportes: Tableaux de chasse (Paris:Mona Bismarck Foundation; Gien: Mus6e International de la Chasse,1998); and Hal Opperman, J-B. Oud?y, exh. cat. (Fort Worth: KimbellArt Museum, 1983).

9. Charles Blanc, "Alexandre-Franmois Desportes" and "Jean-BaptisteOudry," in Histoire des peintres de toutes les kcoles: Ecole ftaniaise (Paris:Jules Renouard, 1865), vol. 2, n.p.

10. See Gabriel P. Weisberg, "Philippe Rousseau and Edwin Landseer inthe Context of Second Empire Animal and Still-Life Imagery," ArtsMagazine 59 (May 1985): 108-11; and Ronald de Leeuw, Philippe Rous-seau 1816-1887 (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1993).

11. John Berger, "Courbet and the Jura," in About Looking (New York: Vin-tage, 1980), 142-43.

12. Courbet's letter to Alfred Bruyas (Ornans, November-December 1854)mentioned hunting as an excuse for violent exercise. Courbet's lettersto his sister Juliette (Frankfurt, February 8, 1859) and Francis Wey (Or-nans, April 20, 1861) bragged about hunting exploits in Germany. SeeLetters of Gustave Courbet, 129, 165-66, 192-95.

13. Once under the stress of painting and organizing his solo exhibition,Courbet wished to escape from work and became "a fanatic poacher,"as he confessed in a letter to Louis Frantais (Ornans, February 1855),in Letters of Gustave Courbet, 135.

14. Jules Castagnary, Gustave Courbet (1882), ed. Bertrand Tillier (Paris:S6quences, 2000), 48: "Chasseur autant que peintre, il interrompit plusd'une fois l'6tude commence pour saisir le fusil et abattre quelquepiece au passage."

15. Courbet to Juliette and to Wey, in Letters of Gustave Courbet, 165-67,193-95.

16. Courbet to Champfleury, Ornans, December 1860, in Letters of GustaveCourbet, 185.

17. Courbet was commissioned to paint at least one hunter's portrait, awolf hunt, and a painting of two poachers in the course of his career.See Letters of Gustave Courbet, 159, 237, 463. For Courbet's strategy toattract a clientele of sportsmen, see Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, "Packag-ing and Marketing Nature," in The Most Arrogant Man in France: GustaveCourbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2007), 162-69.

18. Letters of Gustave Courbet, 180, 195. Courbet had hoped that the statewould purchase The Stag at Bay in 1861, but the negotiations fellthrough; it was later acquired by the city of Marseilles, but not until1865.

19. See Thor6, "Salon de 1861," vol. 1, 36; and Paul Casimir-Pirier, Proposd'art a l'occasion du Salon de 1869 (Paris: Michel L6vy, 1869), 233-34.

20. Jules Champfleury, "Courbet" (1872), in A propos de Gustave Courbet durealisme et autres textes (Paris: Rumeur des Ages, 2000), 16: "Les animauxde Courbet, ses forets, ses rochers, ses fontaines, ne t6moiguent-ils pasd'un amour d6sint6ress6 de la nature!"

21. Courbet to Wey, in Letters of Gustave Courbet, 193.

22. For the history of taxidermy and its influence on the painting andsculpture of animals, see Amandine Pbquignot, "Dans ]a peau d'unspecimen naturalis6: La repr6sentation do monde animal en taxider-mie," in Hommeanimal: Histoire dun face a face, ed. Laurent Baridon,exh. cat. (Strasbourg: Mus6es de Strasbourg, 2004), 155-62.

23. The art critic Edmond About identified the figure as Courbet's self-portrait and admired the energetic and masterful facture of the paint-ing in Nos artistes au Salon de 1857 (Paris: Hachette, 1858), 147.

24. Louis Enoult, Le Pays, July 14, 1857.

25. Jean Rousseau, Le Figaro, June 28, 1857.

26. ThMophile Gautier, "Salon de 1857," L'Artistee 2 (September 20, 1857):34-35: "In fact, in any other master you will not come across such amarvelous execution of nature. The nose a humid and glistening black-ness, the deep wells of the eyes .... the anatomy of the animal, bothrelaxed and stiffened by death, are rendered with truthfulness and anincomparable force and breadth [En effet, chez aucun maitre, vous ne ren-contrerez une nature d'une execution plus merveilleuse. Le museau d'un noirhumide et lustrl, les yeux au larrnier profond ... ,l'anatomie de la b9te, t lafois reldchke et raidie par la mort, sont rendus avec voite, une force et une lar-geur incomparable]."

27. Jules Castagnary, "Salon de 1857," in Saloons (Paris: G. Charpentier et E.Fasquelle 1892), vol. 1, 26-30.

28. Armand Bartlet, quoted in Les amis de Gustave Courbet Bulletin 30(1962): 15: "Ses personages me genent. L'un, arcbout6 contre unsapin, et fumant sa pipe en tournant le dos A la scbne qui doitl'intr&esser, s'endort doucement dans un indiffbrence que je ne com-prends gu6re a I'lheure d'une curle chaude; lautre, lajoue enfl6e pardes pretensions A une fanfare impossible, s'endort, comme son maitre,auquel il tourne le dos a son tour." The theme of sleep long engagedCourbet; see Aaron Sheon, "Courbet, French Realism, and the Discov-ery of the Unconscious," Arts Magazine 55 (February 1981): 114-28.

29. "The French Etching Club," Round Table 32 (March 31, 1866): 199,quoted in Douglas E. Edelson, "Courbet's Reception in America before1900," in Faunce and Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered, 68.

30. Courbet, "Notes sur la chasse," in Courbet, racontO par lui-mWme, vol. 1,38-39: "L'abondance du gibier n'est pas tres n6cessaire pour des chas-seurs qui ont lesprit de la chasse. Un libvre btant donn6, la mise enscene peut etre complbte." In 1861, Courbet was commissioned by thepublisher Furne to produce a series of articles and drawings on the"realist history of the old-time and present-day hunters of the Jura."See his letter to Max Buchon, Ornans, January 1861, in Letters ofGustave Courbet, 188-89. Although the project was not actually carriedout, the commission itself signaled Courbet's well-recognized impor-tance as a visual and textual narrator of the hunting history of his na-tive region.

31. Elzear Blaze, "Le chasseur," in Les Franais peints par eux-meme (Paris:Curmer, 1840), vol. 1, 217-24: "The good and true hunter likes thecombat more than the victory and the booty. If he hunts, it is to em-ploy the activity of his legs, the resources of his genius, the dexterity ofhis arms, and the precision of his glance [Le bon et vrai chasseur aime lecombat plus que pour In victoire et le butin. S'il chasse, c'est pour deplayerl'activito de ses jambes, les ressources de son genie, ladresse de ses bras, Ia just-esse de son coup doeil] ." Among Blaze's highly informative hunting bookswere the treatise on various hunting techniques and preys, Le chasseurau chien d'arret: Contenant les habitudes, les ruses du gibier, V art de le chercheret de le tirer, le choix des armes, I' Mducation des chiens, leurs maladies, etc.(Paris, 1836); and the recounting of hunting history, Le chasseur conteuroa les chroniques de la chasse contenant des histoires, des contes, des anecdoteset par-ci par-la, quelques hableries sur la chasse depuis Charlemagne jusqu 'dnosjours (1840), which were reprinted throughout the Second Empire.

32. Euglne Forest, "Salon de 1857-tableaux de chasse et natures mortes,"Journal des Chasseurs 23 (Paris, 1857): 132-34.

33. For the Allston Club's enthusiasm in purchasing The Quarry and orga-nizing an exhibition for it in 1866, see Edelson, "Courbet's Receptionin America," 69.

34. The submission was rejected by the Salon jury and its whereabouts isunknown. See Letters of Gustave Courbet, 40.

35. For the hunting regulations, see Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire uni-versel du XIXe sitcle (Paris, 1866), s.v. "chasse," vol. 3, 1049-51.

36. For the provincials' resentment of the law and their poaching activities,see Eric Verdel, ed., Chasse, chasseurs, chassee: Archeologie et histoire d'unecontroverse, exh. cat. (Charavines: Maison du Pays d'Art et d'Histoire,1992), 28-29.

37. Klaus Herding, "The Painter's Studio: Focus of World Events, Site of Rec-onciliation," in Courbet: To Venture Independence, 55-61.

38. Courbet to Chamnpfleury, Ornans, November-December 1854, in Lettersof Gustave Courbet, 131.

39. See Alphonse de La Rue, Les chasses du Second Empire 1852-1870 (Paris:Firmin-Didot, 1882), 32. According to La Rue, an inspector of forestsunder the Second Empire, from 55,000 to 60,000 shots were fired eachyear at the emperor's sixteen shooting parties, and the total bag was25,000 heads of game.

40. Herding, Courbet: To Venture Independence, 59, 75; and Guernsey, "Child-hood and Aesthetic Education," 71-88.

41. JeanJacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Every-man, 2004), 255.

42. See Ceri Crossley, Consumable Metaphors: Attitudes towards Animals andVegetarianism in Nineteenth-Century France (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 18-19.

43. Jules Castagnary, "Fragments d'un livre sur Courbet," pt. 1, Gazette desBeaux-Arts, no. 5 (January 1911): 18: "After getting out of secondaryschool, Courbet was a Romantic, as was his friend Max Buchon and allthe young men at that time.... I reconstructed here the feelings ofGustave Courbet, going by those I experienced myself when I com-pleted my classical studies in the small secondary school of my nativevillage: we had no greater pleasure than reading Lamartine, VictorHugo, and Alfred de Musset in secret, in the study, or while strolling[Du sortir du college, Courbet Ntait romantique comme lI'tait d'ailleurs son amiMax Buchon, et tous les jeunes gens a'lors .... Je reconstruis ici les sentimentsde Gustave Courbet, dapres ceux quej'ai prouve moi-mn e quandjachevaismes humanites dans le petit college de ma ville natale: nous n 'avions pas de


plus grand pkiisir que de lire Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, encachette, d 1'ttude ou d lo promenade]."

44. Alphonse de Lamartine, "La mort d'un chevreuil," Bulletin de SociteProtectrice des Animaux 1 (1855): 236: "When the smoke of my gun dis-persed, pale and trembling, I confronted my crime. The poor charm-ing animal was not dead. He looked at me, his head resting on thegrass, his eyes swimming with tears. I will never forget that look towhich surprise and pain, the tnexpectedness of death, appeared togive the profundity of human sentiment, as intelligible as words; forthe soul speaks through the eyes, especially as it dies"; quoted in Kath-leen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 24.

45. Courbet had begun painting Source of Hippocrene but it remained unfin-ished and was destroyed. See Coorbet's letter to Castagnary, Ornans,January 16-18, 1864, in Letters of Gustave Courbet, 235-36. For a discus-sion of the painting as an allegory of poetic inspiration, see Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, "Courbet's Unpainted Pictures," Arts Magazine 55(September 1980): 134-41.

46. See William M. Kane, "Courbet's Chasseur of 1866-67," Yale UniversityArt Gallery Bulletin 25, no. 3 (1960): 31-38.

47. Courbet to Wey, Ornans, April 20, 1861, in Letters of Gustave Courbet,192-93.

48. Courbet, "Notes sur la chasse," 39: "Le chasseur est un homme d'uncaract&re independant qui a l'esprit libre ou du moins le sentiment dela liberte. C'est une dme blessee, un coeur qui va encourager salangueur dans le vague et la m6lancolie des bois."

49. Gaston Ph6bus, "Belle et vilaine chasse," in Le livre de chasse, 1387, fac-simile, CD-ROM (Paris: Bibliothlque Nationale de France, 1999).

50. See Larousse, Grand dictionnaire, s.v. "chasse," vol. 3, 1048; and RobertBurton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621; New York: New York Reviewof Books, 2001), 72. Burton also warned that a mad craze for huntingwould make hunters degenerate into beasts who ignored their neces-sary duties (289).

51. Comte de Buffon, "Le cerf," in Histoire naturelle (Paris, 1749-88), vol.6, 64: "La chasse est le seul amusement qui fasse diversion entiere auxaffaires, le seul d6lassement sans mollesse, le saul qui donne un plaisirvif, sans langeur et sans satihte."

52. Courbet, "Notes sur la chasse," 38-39.

53. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Freud Reader, ed.Peter Gay (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 584-89.

54. For the hunting permit as a symbol of adulthood, see Verdel, Chasse,chasseurs, chass6e, 28. For hunting as an important part of the gentle-man's education, see Larousse, Grand dictionnaire, s.v. "chasse," vol. 3,1048.

55. Among scholarly debates on the gender implications in Courbet's workare Linda Nochlin, "Courbet's Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter'sStudio," 17-41, and Michael Fried, "Courbet's Femininity," 43-53, bothin Faunce and Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered; Sarah Faunce, "Courbet:Feminist in Spite of Himself, " in Body, exh. cat. (Sydney: Art Gallery ofNew South Wales, 1997), 95-108; Amelia Jones, "Meaning, Identity,Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology in Art His-tory," in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen (Ox-ford: Blackwell, 2003), chap. 4; and Thais E. Morgan, "Male LesbianBodies: The Construction of Alternative Masculinities in Courbet,Baudelaire, and Swinburne," Genders 15 (Winter 1992): 37-57. JamesRubin, Courbet, chap. 7, comments on Courbet's "enduring manhood"and male desire. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, "Bisexuality," in The MostArrogant Man in France, chap. 5, pointed out the bisexuality and shiftinggender perspective in Courbet's approach to the female body.

56. Letter to Bruyas, Ornans, May 3, 1854, in Letters of Gustave Courbet, 122.

57. Georges Bataille, "The Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth ofArt," in The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Mi-chelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, ed. Stuart Kendall (Brooklyn: ZoneBooks, 2005), 78-79.

58. The painting was once shown at an exhibition in Saintes in 1863, orga-nized by Etienne Baudry, Courbet's collector and host, and its firstowner was alternately described as Baudry or Phocdora Gaudin, repub-lican lawyer and politician, before it entered the H. 0. Havemeyer col-lection in New York in the late 1880s. Robert Fernier, La vie et l'oeuvrede Gustave Courbet: Catalogue raisonnk, 2 vols. (Lausanne: Bibliothbquedes Arts, 1977), vol. 1, no. 342, lists Gaudin as the painting's firstowner. Sarah Faunce, Courbet Reconsidered, 137, believes that the paint-ing belonged to Etienne Baudry because it was shown in the exhibitionorganized by Baudry in 1863.

59. For the significance of the Exposition Universelle in Besanýon, seeMarie-Helene Laval6e et al., Gustave Courbet et Ia Franche-ComtO (Besan-ýon: Musee des Beaux-Arts et d'Archbologie de Besancon, 2000). Maza-roz accumulated twenty-four of Courbet's paintings in his collection,


and even offered to buy The Burial at Oaans to donate to the museumof his native town, Lons-le-Saunier. For Mazaroz's biography, furniturework, and art collection, see Jean-Paul Mazaroz, un artiste et amateur6claire au temps de Courbet, exh. cat. (Lons-le-Saunier: Mus6e des Beaux-Arts de Lons-le-Saunier, 2003).

60. Courbet to Wey, Ornans, April 20, 1861, in Letters of Gustave Courbet,192.

61. Ph6bus, Le livre de Chasse.

62. Buffon, "Le cerf," 64.

63. For the rich symbolism of the stag, see Hope B. Werness, ed., The Con-tinuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art (New York: Continuum,2004), 390-92.

64. Michael Bath, Image of the Stag: Iconographic Themes in Western Art (Ba-den-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner, 1992).

65. See Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Naturethrough History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 75.

66. See Chu, "It Took Millions of Years," 55- 65.

67. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, ou Exposition des considra-tions relatives A l'histoire naturelle des animaux (Paris, 1809), vol. 1, chap.7.

68. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (NewYork: Modern Library, 1936), chap. 4; and idem, The Descent of Manand Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Modern Library', 1936), 93.

69. For research on hunting as part of the culture of imperialism and onthe myth of the "Great White Hunter," see John M. MacKenzie, Empireof Nature: Hunting, Conservation and the British Empire (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1988); James R. Ryan, "Hunting with theCamera: Photography, Wildlife, and Colonialism in Africa," in AnimalSpaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, ed.Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (London: Routledge, 2000), chap. 10;and Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning, 134-38.

70. Alphonse Toussenel, L'esprit des betes: Veneriefrantaise et zoologie passion-nelle (Paris: Librairie Soci6t6, 1847), 349-50.

71. Alphonse Toussenel, Tristia: Histoire des miseres et des fleaux de la chasse deFrance (Paris: Dentu, 1863), 355-428.

72. Jules Michelet, Le peuple (1846), ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion,1974).

73. Jules Michelet, L'oiseau, in 0euvres completes, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris:Flammarion, 1971), vol. 17, 62-63: "Ainsi, toute l'histoire naturellem'avait apparu alors comme une branche de la politique. Toutes lesesphces vivantes arrivaient, dans leur humble droit, frappant A la porte,pour se faire admettre an sein de la Democratie."

74. See Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir, 5-21.

75. "Les animaux aux Salons de peinture," Bulletin de Societo Protectrice desAnimaux 13 (1867): 175-81; and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Lepeintreet l'animal en France au XIXe siscle (Paris: tditions de l'Amateur, 2002),253-54.

76. For Rosa Bonheur's attitude toward hunting, see James M. Saslow, "Dis-agreeably Hidden: Construction and Constriction of the Lesbian Bodyin Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair," in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism andArt History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 186-205. On the famous lion hunterJules G6rard, seeLarousse, Grand Dictionnaire, s.v. "chasse an lion," vol. 3, 1052.

77. Courbet to Buchon, Ornans, January 1865, and two letters to GustaveChaudey, Ornans, February-March 1867, in Letters of Gustave Courbet,254, 305-6.

78. On Courbet's borrowing of Delacroix's Turkish rider, scholars havevoiced different opinions. Linda Nochlin considered it unnecessary toread a social meaning into the borrowing and even the painting itself;see her "Gustave Courbet's 'Meeting': A Portrait of the Artist as a Wan-deringJew," Art Bulletin 49 (1967): 213. Herding, To Venture Indepen-dence, 88, interpreted the borrowing as Courbet's appeal for indepen-dence and a protest against Bonapartism. I think that both statementsneed more substantial support, that in this painting Courbet revealedboth his debt to the artistic tradition and his attempt to innovatewithin it, as his hunter differs greatly from the image of the Turkishsoldier in stylistic and semantic aspects. For discussions of the huntingscenes by Rubens and Delacroix, see Susan Koslow, "Law and Order inRubens's Wolf and Fox Hunt," Art Bulletin 78 (December 1996): 680-706; and Eve Twose Kliman, "Delacroix's Lions and Tigers: A Link be-tween Man and Nature," Art Bulletin 64 (September 1982): 446-66.

79. Jules Castagnary, "Salon de 1869," Le SiMcle, May 13, 1869: "Tout estbeau dans cette oeuvre ofi Courbet a d6ploy6 ses meilleures qualit6s decoloriste et de dessinateur."

80. Casimir-P6rier, Propos d'art a l'occasion du Salon de 1869, 233: "I1 peut&tre fort int6ressant pour meisseurs les veneurs et meneurs de meutesde se voir ainsi fiers et vainqueurs dans quelque hall de chAteau, carc'est IA proprement la bataille d'Eylau du chenil mais ce n'est pour lepublic de lart qu'un sujet d'esclaffement."

81. Charles Blanc, Le Temps, June 4, 1869.

82. Albert Wolff, Le Figaro, May 11, 1869.

83. Theophile Gautier described animal suffering in dogfighting and bear-baiting in his book Caprice et zigzags (Paris: Hachette, 1852), 285-320.Gautier also wrote animal-based stories in La nature chez elle et mWnagerieintime (Paris: Charpentier, 1870).

84. Thhophile Gautier, L'Illustration, May 15, 1869; and idem, LejournalOfficiel June 16, 1869.

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Contested Terrain: Gustave Courbet's Hunting Scenes

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