This picture dates to the same year that Courbet debuted his hunting scenes at the Paris Salon of 1857. It invites comparison to the slightly earlier?The Quarry?(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) which includes the same pair of hunting dogs, accompanied by a dead stag instead of a hare. The present work was apparently described by the German painter Otto Scholderer (1834-1902), whose studio was above the one Courbet rented in Frankfurt in the winter of 1858-59. Scholderer noted that Courbet painted the dogs and the landscape from memory but modelled the hare from life.�