This is the first in an ongoing series that will look at individual works on display in the permanent collections of North Texas’ museums.

The fox in Gustave Courbet’s Fox in the Snow, 1860, is such a cuddly, fuzzy thing, striking a playful canine pose, that we might mistake this snow-covered scene for a pleasant wintery vignette on a holiday greeting card. Then we notice what the fox is doing. At his paw, there is a dead rat, and caught in his jaw is an indecipherable hunk of flesh. On the pristine white of the snow, there are smatterings of blood, placed there with a light, twisting wrist flick of the painter’s hand.

It is a violent, contradictory scene, so visually pleasant even as it draws us into the harsh, frigid winter, seducing us with the image of an animal gnawing his way to survival. The upward thrust of the craggy rocks, the weighted branches of the snow-laden trees: the action of the canvas draws our eye around the animal which cuts a crescent shape through the center of the frame.

Like the fox, the figure of Gustave Courbet cuts across a transitional period in the history of art, and in this work we can see many of the elements that distinguished his sense of realism from the Romantic and Classical periods that preceded him. Close inspection of the surface reveals a breaking down of realistic detail – sharp, frantic, unconcealed brush strokes. By organizing the composition around this central figure of the fox, Courbet does not recreate perspective for the sake of scientific accuracy, but rather uses dimensionality to accentuate the presence of the fox, which almost seems to sit on the painting’s surface. The entire canvas is organized to convey singularity of emotion, and no element of this scene is allowed to simply exist. Everything here is pulled into the thrusting tumble of the action which pulls the viewer deep into its drama.

Painting concurrently with the advent of early photography, Courbet is considered a godfather to modernism and modern realism. Mere decades later Monet would paint vibrantly colored natural scenes with little regard for detail or documentary realism. It was impressionistic: the world filtered through subjective experience of the artist.

While elements of realism remain intact in this painting, Courbet is no less bending a natural scene to the demands of his own painterly sense, asserting in his own way the reality of the canvas plane as a world in and of itself. Common, harsh, and Darwinian, it is no Romantic ideal. This is an ice-covered world, on fire with white.

You can find Gustave Courbet’s Fox in the Snow on the second floor of the Dallas Museum of Art in the European art section.

Gustave Courbet, 'Fox in the Snow,' 1860. Oil on canvas; 33 3/4 x 5 5/16 in. Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, Mrs. John B. O'Hara Fund.