Poachers in the snow

With the idea of a sincere painting deviating from academic fantasies, Courbet continues to revolutionize the pictorial world, thus proposing an encounter with reality. He paints what he sees or experiences, the banality of gestures and regional customs, and insists on this truth which he transcribes. In 1844, a new law prohibits the practice of hunting at night, but also during snowy weather, when it was completely free around Ornans. 

In the snowy landscape, he represents "Les Braconniers", two men accompanied by their dogs who cross a snowy hill in the footsteps of game. It depicts a certain violence, in the gesture and the posture, in an act of determination, but also by the subject of the theme of the hunt in which the animal is always defeated. He reveals the custom of hunting, in paintings that he creates outdoors during the winter.