[2] Behind them, in the painting's middle, a bearded man in a hat (a self-portrait of Courbet[3]) leans against a second tree alongside his rifle, his arms crossed, smoking a pipe.

[9] Art dealers van Isachers and Jules Luquet bought the painting in Anvers in 1858 for 8,000 francs, and sold it in turn to the Allston Club in Boston in 1866,[5][10] making it the first Courbet work to travel to the United States.

The face, a humid and polished black; the eyes with deep tearpits; the frontal protuberances; the hair, thick, short, feltlike, speckled with cowlicks, shimmering with shadows; and the anatomy of the beast at once relaxed and stiffened with death are rendered with an incomparable realism, forcefulness, and size.

Shao-Chien Tseng, writing in The Art Bulletin in 2008, interprets the inertness differently from Barthet and other contemporaries of Courbet's:[10]The hornsman, who ought to blow a fanfare to announce the desired conclusion and increase the excitement, seems instead to sound a dirge for the repose of the dead.

Fried categorizes The Quarry, alongside The Wheat Sifters and The Painter's Studio, as a "real allegory", part of "a remarkable sustained meditation on the nature of pictorial realism" despite not itself being about painting.