The Circassians were excellent horsemen who were noted throughout the Ottoman empire for their skill, noble beauty and pale skin. Le Retour de la Chasse was probably executed in Gérôme's studio in Paris following one of his numerous trips to the Near East, as the pink jacket was a studio prop that he had used previously in Les Joueurs de Dames (1859) and Bashi-Bazouk (1878) and the colcasia plant, doe, fountain and niche can also been found in works from the 1850s. Edward Strahan (E. Shinn) wrote of the picture: "Here the artist...has given his sense of beauty full play, and resolved to paint a scene in which none but noble forms should enter--of man and beast and architecture. The picture is beautiful like a fairy story; the fountain dates from the Arabian Nights, the straight-nosed, long-limbed rider, with his steel cap and his mailed arms, is as handsome as St. George." In Le Retour de la Chasse Gerald Ackerman comments on the links between realism and anecdotal, genre works: "Contemporary critical opinion demanded of Orientalist paintings both sound information and aesthetic pleasure. To achieve these ends...Gérôme could seek out simultaneously intense veracity and rely for composition and effect upon 17th Century precedents." (G. Ackerman, op. cit. p.145)