Chasseurs dans la neige

Painted in 1864 and now in the Musées Nationaux Récupération collection, this winter hunting scene places Courbet's two great provincial subjects — the winter landscape and the hunt — in direct combination. Hunting in snow was a traditional subject in European art, from Flemish winter landscapes to the hunt scenes of Oudry and Desportes, but Courbet's version has the characteristic Realist insistence on observed fact: the snow is cold and deep, the hunters' exertion visible, the animals real rather than heraldic. The late 1850s and 1860s saw Courbet produce an extensive series of hunting and winter landscape subjects that are among his most technically assured works, demonstrating a landscape practice rooted in direct observation of the Jura landscape across all seasons.

Snow surfaces in Courbet's winter paintings are rendered with extraordinary variety — fresh fallen powder, trampled boot-prints, blue-shadowed wind-shaped drifts — using palette knife and brush in combination. The warm ochre tones of hunters' clothing and dogs' fur create vivid contrasts against the blue-white snow. Deep winter sky is typically a muted, overcast grey-blue.