1686 -1755 · Paris, Versailles, Beauvais and Gobelins

Hunting dogs, exotic animals, still lifes and large boxes make Jean-Baptiste Oudry the main animal painter of the reign of Louis XV.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry was born in Paris in 1686 into a family of painters and merchants. After the Academy of Saint-Luc, he became the student and then assistant of the portraitist Nicolas de Largillière. This training taught him to describe coat, fabric, metal and flesh using a distinct material. Received at the Royal Academy in 1719, Oudry gradually abandoned worldly portraiture for animals, hunts, landscapes and still lifes. Louis XV called him to Versailles to paint the dogs of the royal pack. The artist is not content with generic silhouettes: posture, age, temperament and relationship with game individualize each animal. Clara the rhino, painted grandeur nature after the animal's passage to Paris, transformed a European celebrity into a monumental presence. The massive profile, the folds of skin and the scale of the decor combine observation and spectacle. Oudry also produced decorative cycles such as Les Divertissements champêtres, where hunting, fishing, walking and snacking were inserted into arabesques intended for architecture. From 1726, his tapestry drawings became essential. Artistic director of Beauvais in 1734 then of Gobelins, he renewed the factories with readable, colorful compositions adapted to weaving. His illustrations of La Fontaine's Fables show the same intelligence of animal gestures. Death to Beauvais in 1755, Oudry linked easel painting, royal decoration, illustrated book and tapestry in a work of extraordinary diversity. The "Jean-Baptiste Oudry" selection notably compares Clara the rhino and Bittern and partridge guarded by a white dog. His reading favors color.

Oudry paints the animal as a portrait: the weight, the look and the tension of the body give each species an individual presence even before the setting tells its story.