About this work
- It is an oil on canvas depicting **two hunters (or poachers?) and their dogs in a snowy landscape**.
- The painting is held at the **Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie, Besançon, France**.
- Courbet first started painting snow scenes in the winter of 1856–57, but it was only in the 1860s that he developed a strong interest in this theme, no doubt inspired by the Franche-Comté countryside, which suffered particularly heavy snowfalls in the winter of 1866–67.
**Hunters in the Snow (The Poachers) — Gustave Courbet, 1867**
Two figures move through a hushed, snow-blanketed landscape, their dogs threading ahead through drifts and bare branches. The painting holds a deliberate ambiguity at its centre — the men are hunters, or perhaps poachers — and their dogs press through the snow as the figures pick their way across the frozen terrain. The title's dual meaning is the painting's quiet charge: it refuses to settle. The palette is a harmony of tinted whites, steely greys, and blues, laced with the rusted browns and blacks of rock and earth that peek darkly from beneath the snow.
Snow is built up with a palette knife in varied textures — crunchy packed banks and feathery sprays on stripped winter trees — while cool blue ice is slicked smooth with broad, soft brushes. The result is a surface of extraordinary tactile variety: paint that describes cold by *being* cold.
Courbet completed this oil on canvas in 1867,
a period when he had developed a deep and sustained engagement with snow as a subject, spurred in part by the particularly heavy winter falls across his native Franche-Comté in 1866–67.
Exploring snow and its textures in a series that would ultimately number some eighty scenes, Courbet observed these winter landscapes first in Franche-Comté and later, during his exile, in the Alps.
From the mid-1850s into the 1860s, he had applied his realist style and spirit to landscapes and hunting subjects, and this painting sits at the heart of that turn. The hunting genre also carried social undertones — the word *braconnier* (poacher) pointed at questions of access, land ownership, and legality that were politically charged in Second Empire France. Courbet's lifelong attachment to his
