Contested terrain: Gustave Courbet's hunting scenes

Unlike the decorative and propagandist royal commissions and the paintings of fantastic Oriental hunts that flourished in mid-nineteenth-century France, Gustave Courbet's hunting imagery became a vehicle for self-inquiry and the reinvention of history painting. Courbet's writings and his revision of the genre engage in dialogue with the notions of hunting as a native heritage and masculine sport and the established tropes of the noble stag and the melancholy artist. The psychological intensity, ethical dilemma, and social struggles embedded in the hunting scenes resonate with themes central to the contemporaneous discourses on natural history and animal rights.