Jean-Baptiste Oudry

Born Paris, 17 March 1686; Died Beauvais, 30 April 1755).

French painter. He was the principal animal painter and one of the foremost decorative painters during the first half of Louis XV’s reign. After initial training as a portrait painter, he concentrated on still-lifes; by the 1720s he had also begun to establish himself as a specialist in hunting scenes, game-pieces and portraits of animals. He ran an active workshop, often keeping his best originals for years and selling copies and (more or less autograph) variants. In the 1730s he was most active as a tapestry designer, making numerous designs for the royal tapestry works of Beauvais and the Gobelins, and he continued to produce his brilliantly painted hunts, still-lifes and studies of animals and birds to the end of his career.

1. Early years, before c 1719.

The son of Jacques Oudry (c. 1661–1720), a painter and picture-dealer prominent in the Académie de St-Luc, Paris, he first studied in 1704 with Michel Serre (1658–1733), a painter active in Marseille but who was in Paris for much of that year. Around 1705 Oudry began a five-year apprenticeship with Nicolas de Largillierre; he also attended drawing classes at the Académie de St-Luc and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Master in the Académie de St-Luc in 1708 (his reception piece was a bust-length St Jerome; untraced), Oudry set out to accept whatever work he could find; he thus acquired a habit of easy compliancy, sensitivity to changing fashion and a tolerance of differing tastes, which would all later serve him well. In June 1713 he began an illustrated ‘livre de raison’ (Paris, Louvre), a useful guide to his work to c. 1718. As a follower of Largillierre, then at the peak of his fame, Oudry worked mainly as a portrait painter (few examples have survived), but his production was only half that of his master; he produced only about 20 portraits a year, which were smaller and less lucrative as a source of income. Oudry’s clients were mostly of the modest bourgeoisie and the minor nobility, whom he later described as demanding and niggardly sitters who prevented him from doing his artistic best. He painted more than competently, knew how to capture an acceptable likeness and was suitably fashionable in his use of costume and setting, but he fell short of Largillierre’s great gift for realizing unified portrayals of character. Next to portraiture, his preference during this period was for still-lifes; he produced a few small trompe l’oeil paintings of dead songbirds (two examples 1712; Agen, Mus. B.-A.), but he also experimented in other genres, including landscapes and city views, such as the Fire of the Petit Pont (1718; Paris, Carnavalet). Emulating Jean Antoine Watteau, he attempted the genre of the Italian comedy in Italian Comedians (priv. col.), the popularity of which is attested by an engraving and many painted copies.

In June 1717 Oudry was approved (agréé) in the Académie Royale, submitting two pictures: A Garland of Vegetables (ex-Schwerin, Staatl. Mus.) and an enormous Adoration of the Magi (Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, Val de Marne, St Georges), originally painted for the chapter house of St-Martin-des-Champs, Paris, and his only surviving large-scale church picture. In February 1719 he was received (reçu) by the Académie Royale as a history painter with his Abundance with her Attributes (Versailles, Château); in this picture the contrast between the conventional allegorical figure and the brilliantly painted surrounding array of fruits, vegetables and animals foreshadows his future career.

Between 1722 and 1725 Oudry’s still-lifes and hunting scenes—the latter a new theme for him—attracted an increasingly enthusiastic following at the annual open-air Exposition de la Jeunesse held on the feast of Corpus Christi in the Place Dauphine, Paris. In the series of Four Elements (1719–21; Stockholm, Royal Pal.), Oudry can be seen to have progressed from employing an old-fashioned decorative ordering of meticulously painted detail to the use of a freer and more loosely rhythmical style. The Dead Wolf and Dead Roe (both London, Wallace) also date from 1721. Obviously intended as dining-room buffets, and among his earliest depictions of dogs and the spoils of the hunt, they are as impressive for their rich and persuasive depiction of natural objects as they are for the variety and ingenuity of their formal arrangement. Two years later his Stag Hunt (Stockholm, Royal Pal.), nearly 5 m wide, finally attracted the attention he sought. These hunting scenes and animal portraits were a direct challenge to Alexandre-François Desportes, who since the turn of the century had been the principal painter of these types in France. In contrast to the disinterested naturalism, probity and dignity of Desportes’s work, Oudry offered dramatic lighting and settings, rich colouring and heightened effects of gesture and pose, all ultimately derived from Largillierre’s style of portraiture. Oudry’s blend of nature and fancy, with greater emphasis upon the latter, is characteristic of the genre pittoresque, the new ornamental style of the 1720s.

In 1723 or early 1724 Oudry met the influential Louis Fagon (1680–1744), Intendant des Finances, and Henri-Camille, Marquis de Beringhen (1693–1770), Premier Ecuyer du Roi, who was prominent in the elaborate organization of the royal hunt (a sport to which Louis XV was rapidly becoming devoted). Given the use of a studio in the Tuileries, Oudry soon began to receive royal commissions, such as the double portrait of two of the royal whippets, Misse and Turlu (Fontainebleau, Château), and in 1725 he was given lodgings there. With his Fox Hunt and Wolf Hunt (both Chantilly, Mus. Condé) and his Roe Hunt (Rouen, Mus. B.-A.), delivered to Chantilly in 1725 for the Duc de Bourbon (but paid for by the Crown), Oudry broke Desportes’s royal monopoly. The King ordered a series of overdoors portraying his favourite hunting dogs for his apartments at Compiègne—a further encroachment on Desportes’s territory. The same year Oudry was the most visible artist—with 12 pictures—at the Salon (the only one held between 1704 and 1737), and on 10 March 1726 he presented a command exhibition of 26 pictures at Versailles. In addition, Fagon obtained for him employment as painter to the royal tapestry works at Beauvais; this set the stage for a decisive change of direction in Oudry’s career. Over the next ten years he designed a number of tapestry sets, including the Comedies of Molière (four pieces, woven after 1732), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (eight pieces, woven from 1734) and the Fables of La Fontaine (four panels, woven after 1736); his cartoons have not survived.

In January 1728 Oudry began preparing an impressive picture of Louis XV Hunting the Stag near the Forest of Saint-Germain, installed at Marly two years later (now Toulouse, Mus. Augustins). The great success of this picture led to Oudry’s commission in 1733 for the series of nine Royal Hunts of Louis XV, to be woven at the Gobelins. These tapestries, based on his finished oil pictures (eight Fontainebleau, Château; one Paris, Louvre; initial oil sketches Paris, Mus. Nissim de Camondo, and elsewhere), the last of which was delivered to the Gobelins in 1746, were woven twice under Oudry’s supervision. One set, at Compiègne, was made for the château; the other (Florence, Pitti) was sold to Philip, Duke of Parma (1720–65), the King’s son-in-law. In the Royal Hunts, stages of the stag-hunt from ceremony to pursuit unfold in the recognizable settings of the royal forests (Compiègne in particular). For the series Oudry drew upon the best examples of the 15th and 16th centuries, such as the Hunts of Maximilian (c. 1530–40; Paris, Louvre), a set of 12 tapestries woven at Brussels after the designs of Bernard van Orley, which were copied several times at the Gobelins. Despite the limited time he spent away from tapestry during this period, between 1729 and 1734 Oudry prepared a complete set of 275 drawings for an illustrated edition of Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (pubd from 1755). During the 1730s he also produced some interesting easel pictures, including a number of innovative views of the countryside around Paris; his animal pictures, for example the Lion and the Midge (1732; Stockholm, Nmus.), were increasingly drawn from life studies (this included visits to the royal menagerie at Versailles), as he gradually abandoned the genre pittoresque.

In 1734 he was made Director at Beauvais. He soon stopped painting cartoons himself and brought in François Boucher, who proved to be a superb tapestry designer. Oudry’s astute judgement made these years the only really profitable ones in the long history of Beauvais. This in turn made him unpopular at the rival Gobelins works, where jealousy and resistance increased in direct proportion to his authority (he was Inspector of all the works at the Gobelins by 1748). Meanwhile, in 1737, the Salons had begun again, and Oudry, eager for public adulation, quickly learnt how to respond to a new audience.

3.

Later years, 1737–55.

Salon criticism, reflecting both public and academic taste, singled out two qualities valued above all: expression and illusion. Thus, although Oudry’s Mallards Attacked by a Bird of Prey (1740; Schwerin, Staatl. Mus.) may seem calculated and artificial, its aerial perspective is superbly managed, and one can sense the fierce surprise of the attack and the ensuing panic, and easily imagine the sounds of water splashing, reeds rustling and wings beating air. One of his greatest Salon successes was the Wild Sow and her Young Attacked by Mastiffs (w. 4 m, 1748; Caen, Mus. B.-A.). The passion and tumult recall the spectacle of a battle tapestry by Charles Lebrun—in fact, Oudry was probably angling for a Gobelins tapestry commission for combats of wild animals. The most noticed of all his pictures was the Bitch-hound Nursing her Pups (1752; Paris, Mus. Chasse & Nat.), the star of the Salon of 1753, where it was purchased by the philosophe Paul-Henri, Baron d’Holbach (1723–89); Denis Diderot later commented upon it as an exemplary work. This perfect image of maternal sentiment is illuminated by a beam of sunlight, the reflections of which reach the darkest corners of the stall, a feat contemporaries found equal to Rembrandt in understanding and skill.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry: Dog Guarding Dead Game, oil on canvas, 25…His ventures into illusion include the six remarkable pictures of irregular Stag Antlers (all Fontainebleau, Château) painted between 1741 and 1752. Some have dark, patterned backgrounds, while others (fonds blancs, a special category singled out by contemporaries) are presented against pale stone walls. These antlers appear to project into the beholder’s space, while casting subtle shadows on the wall. Oudry’s last trompe l’oeil works were a pair of still-lifes dated 1753, the Hare, Pheasant and Red-legged Partridge (Paris, Louvre) and the White Duck (Houghton Hall, Norfolk), the latter a pedagogical demonstration of the relativity of whiteness and the achievement of tonal relief without strong contrasts of value. Although a number of Oudry’s still-lifes and game-pieces contain elements of narrative fable or moralizing anecdote, others prompt a meditative response in a less overt manner. His Tulip Bed and Vase of Flowers (1744; Detroit, MI, Inst. A), for example, is a meaningful juxtaposition of the exotic and the common in nature, while the haunting Dead Crane (1745; Schwerin, Staatl. Mus.), one of a series depicting animals and birds from the Versailles menagerie, is a melancholy study of beauty and death.

Oudry’s landscapes are idealized images of rural life; this is particularly the case in The Farm (1750; Paris, Louvre). Set in the bountiful (and beautiful) Ile-de-France, and painted to the Dauphin’s own detailed specifications, The Farm (a title the picture acquired in the 19th century) was intended to help promote the state’s progressive agricultural policies; as a result it contrasts strongly with the idyllic pastoral scenes Boucher, for example, was producing in the same period. Oudry exploited landscape in quite another way in the hundred or more large, black-and-white chalk drawings (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A., and elsewhere) made in the mid-1740s of the Château d’Arcueil’s abandoned park and gardens, as admirable for their detached exploration of light and form as for their pre-Romantic sensibilité. A prolific draughtsman, Oudry hoarded his numerous highly finished drawings, and they brought very high prices in the decades immediately following his death. His oil pictures show a similar concern with finish, particularly the later ones. In these he demonstrated his aesthetic of the ‘beau terminé’; this required a quick, sure preparation, thinly applied, to receive the finishing touches (delicate nuances of pelt and plumage) in the glazes; much of his second lecture at the Académie Royale in 1752 (where he was made a professor in 1743) concerned specific recipes for this facture.

Oudry did not amass a large fortune, but the income from his art and benefices enabled him to live comfortably. While helping to set some trends and reinforce others, he never really challenged the taste of his times. To a large extent his art was determined by the market; as a result he often worked at the highest level of taste, but rarely at the most enduring. In addition to the King, for whom he painted numerous pictures, Oudry’s collectors included Count Carl Gustav Tessin, Sweden’s ambassador, responsible for the magnificent Oudry collection in Stockholm; and Friedrich, Crown Prince (later Duke) of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1717–85). The largest and most representative collection of Oudry’s pictures is at Schwerin. His son, Jacques-Charles Oudry (1722/3–78), worked in Paris and Brussels, and his best paintings are very close in style and subject-matter to those of his father (e.g. Dog and Dead Game, 1748; Montpellier, Mus. Fabre), although the anatomical depiction is sometimes weak. Jacques-Charles spent his last years in Lausanne as a drawing-master, and died there in straitened circumstances.

H. N. Opperman. "Oudry, Jean-Baptiste." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T064289 (accessed March 7, 2012).