Running deer in Plaisir-Fontaine creek

Dated 1866 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, this dramatic hunting scene of deer running across a stream at the Plaisir-Fontaine locality in the Doubs valley belongs to Courbet's mature hunting subject series. Plaisir-Fontaine was a specific landscape he knew intimately, and the deer in flight through a watercourse gave him the opportunity to combine his animal, water, and landscape skills in a unified action composition. The painting participates in the French tradition of large-format hunting and animal painting, from Desportes and Oudry in the eighteenth century to the Barbizon painters' interest in wildlife, but Courbet's version has the physical energy and material conviction of witnessed experience rather than decorative convention.

Animals in motion required Courbet to make decisions about the instant of movement to freeze — the extension of legs, the posture of the neck, the direction of the head. Splashing water around the deer's legs required the same spontaneous palette knife energy as his waterfall subjects. The dense forest setting is handled with the established dark-green technique of his woodland landscapes.