Melancholic Mourning: The Hunt Breakfast by Gustave Courbet Within the Context of Hunting Culture During the Second Empire in France

The Hunt Breakfast (1858) by Gustave Courbet represents a complex pictorial composition that refers to historical depictions of hunting meals and can be interpreted in comparison with them. The chapter examines the interplay of hunting, eating, and gender, codified in Europe since the Middle Ages, using the example of European hunting culture, with particular reference to the French Second Empire, in order to evaluate Courbet’s image in terms of its political and social stance. It is shown that the work not only contains numerous references to the history of painting but also develops an ambivalent relationship to hunting, calling a gender-bound, hierarchical object-subject relationship into question.