Carcasses and Trophies: Animal Models in Gustave Courbet's Hunting Scenes (original) (raw)

2021, 19e École de printemps

In recent years, Gustave Courbet’s hunting scenes have been the subject of a renewed historical-critical interest. Critics and historians have long insisted on Courbet’s reputation as an excellent hunter, without realising that such a characterisation was not reflected in the judgement of the immediate commentators of the artist’s work. Indeed, Courbet’s paintings were often criticised for the unnatural, rigid, and artificial rendering of the portrayed animals. These observations are confirmed by some letters in which the artist describes his working practice, which was based on the use of carcasses and trophies as study models. Courbet used to choose a specimen - either stuffed by a taxidermist, or recently dead and supplied by a butcher - and to paint a faithful portrait of it without worrying about the likeness of the pose, given the uncertainties of coeval taxidermy. Isolated in the centre of the canvas, the painted animal was placed in an artificial environment with no pictorial or spatial relationship with the subject, as in a museum diorama. By analysing some of Courbet's most famous hunting scenes and juxtaposing them with works on similar subjects by the photographer John Dillwyn Llewelyn and the painters Jean-Baptiste Oudry, George Stubbs, Gilles Aillaud, and Gerhard Richter, this paper will focus on the pictorial and meta-pictorial impact of the artist’s practice. Finally, it will show how Courbet’s hunting scenes - with their dramatic disconnection between the bodies of the animals and the landscape and with the existential meaning they can assume - can play a central role in the contemporary reflection on the relationship between man, animals, and the environment.