Fighting Stags in a Forest

Fighting Stags in a Forest, painted in 1855 and held at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, belongs to Courbet's major series of animal paintings depicting the drama of the rutting season, when stags engage in spectacular and violent combat for dominance over females and territory. These large-scale animal paintings were among Courbet's most popular works, combining the dramatic subject matter that appealed to Second Empire taste with the Realist observation of animal behavior and natural environment that distinguished Courbet's treatment from conventional academic animal painting. The forest setting allows Courbet to demonstrate simultaneously his command of animal anatomy and his ability to render the specific visual character of a French forest — the dense undergrowth, the texture of bark, the quality of light filtered through canopy. Hunting and animal subjects were taken seriously at the Salon during this period, and Courbet's entries in this genre enhanced his standing with audiences who might have been alienated by his social subject matter.

Oil on canvas on a large scale, this painting demands sustained command of animal anatomy: Courbet observed deer closely and studied their physical structure with the same empirical commitment he brought to human figures. The stags' musculature and antlers are rendered with close attention to structural accuracy, while the forest environment is built with the layered, textured paint handling of his landscape work.