Courbet was the self-styled leader of the Realist movement in French art. Most of his paintings of modern life were condemned as offensively ordinary, but The Quarry was well received when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1857. Probably set in the Jura Mountains along the French-Swiss border, the painting features the artist himself, posed as a huntsman. Courbet enlarged the original canvas as he worked, adding one piece across the top above the hunter’s head and others to include the horn blower and the dogs. In 1866 when he learned that The Quarry had been purchased by a group of young Boston artists, Courbet exclaimed: “What care I for the Salon, what care I for honors, when the art students of a new and great country know and appreciate and buy my works?”