GENERAL DESCRIPTION
This monumental canvas is an excellent example of the kind of animal painting by which Jean-Baptiste Oudry secured his reputation during the early part of his career. Although a prolific artist, who treated subjects that included history painting, portraiture, landscape, hunting scenes, and simple still life, Oudry's celebrity derived from his animal paintings. This had not a little to do with the great interest taken in the painter by Louis XV, who, recognizing Oudry's special ability to capture the nuance of feather and fur, rewarded him with numerous commissions for animal subjects. The King's love of the hunt is well documented. It is therefore no accident that so many of Oudry's most important commissions depict either the King's hunting escapades, or the exotic animals from the royal menagerie, or the huge stag antlers that the King commanded him to paint as a record of his many trophies of the hunt. Although as a type of subject matter, still-life painting was traditionally less esteemed than those categories of painting that required the representation of the human form, Oudry's inventions won him numerous academic honors and royal privileges, including the directorship of the Beauvais tapestry works.
Oudry's innovative approach to the specialized genre of animal painting is well instanced in this work. Each element of the composition is carefully disposed to achieve a decorative surface pattern of interlacing curved lines. And yet, at the same time, a high degree of illusion is also obtained through the artist's subtle understanding of local color and textural effects. Oudry's coloristic intelligence was a much admired aspect of his painting. But, perhaps even more innovative to his 18th-century viewers was Oudry's ability to infuse an element of dramatic movement in his animal paintings. In this composition, the mingled anxiety and ferociousness of the gangly heron is captured to great effect, as it tries to intimidate the snarling water spaniel with its enormous wing-span and spear-like bill. By applying the same rules of dramatic unity and expressive force that were demanded of the history painter, Oudry effectively elevated the lowly subject matter of animal painting, imbuing it with a greater pictorial interest and complexity.
Excerpt from
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 23-24.
NOTES
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Checked Piction
We are face to face with a ferocious heron confronting a snarling water spaniel in this almost life-sized painting. The artist's keen understanding of the characteristics of each species allows us to believe this staged scene could almost be real.
Heather MacDonald, August 2010
This monumental canvas is an excellent example of the kind of animal painting by which Oudry secured his reputation during the early part of his career. Although a prolific artist, who treated subjects that included history painting, portraiture, landscape, hunting scenes, and simple still life, Oudry's celebrity derived from his animal paintings. This had not a little to do with the great interest taken in the painter by Louis XV, who, recognizing Oudry's special ability to capture the nuance of feather and fur, rewarded him with numerous commissions for animal subjects. The King's love of the hunt is well documented. It is therefore no accident that so many of Oudry's most important commissions depict either the King's hunting escapades, or the exotic animals from the royal menagerie, or the huge stag antlers that the King commanded him to paint as a record of his many trophies of the hunt. Although as a type of subject matter, still-life painting was traditionally less esteemed than those categories of painting that required the representation of the human form, Oudry's inventions won him numerous academic honors and royal privileges, including the directorship of the Beauvais tapestry works.
The Rosenberg Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron may be the prime version of a composition the artist chose to treat twice. Another version of the same composition is now preserved in the Museum of Art and History, Geneva. The replication by an artist of an earlier compositional invention was a common practice in the 18th century, and attests to the popular success of an artist's idea. Oudry's innovative approach to the specialized genre of animal painting is well instanced in this work. Each element of the composition is carefully disposed to achieve a decorative surface pattern of interlacing curved lines. And yet, at the same time, a high degree of illusion is also obtained through the artist's subtle understanding of local color and textural effects. Oudry's coloristic intelligence was a much admired aspect of his painting. But, perhaps even more innovative to his 18th-century viewers was Oudry's ability to infuse an element of dramatic movement in his animal paintings. In this composition, the mingled anxiety and ferociousness of the gangly heron is captured to great effect, as it tries to intimidate the snarling water spaniel with its enormous wing-span and spear-like bill. By applying the same rules of dramatic unity and expressive force that were demanded of the history painter, Oudry effectively elevated the lowly subject matter of animal painting, imbuing it with a greater pictorial interest and complexity.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 23-24.
OUDRY:
Mr. Rosenberg was also quite interested in the more realistic aspect of eighteenth-century art. He bought two very dramatic compositions with animals, Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron (see fig. 49, p. 69) and Study of a Hound Baying (see fig. 55, p. 74), both by Jean-Baptiste Oudry. A major painter of still life and especially of hunting and animal subjects, Oudry depicted an almost violent confrontation between a heron, beautifully observed, and a water spaniel. This is a very typical kind of picture by Oudry, who was the favorite painter of Louis XV, given the king’s love for hunting, more than anything else. Oudry did a whole series of great tapestry cartoons of Louis XV and the hunt (see fig. 80, p. 115), as well as very affectionate and affecting portraits of Louis’s hunting hounds and other animals (see fig. 47, p. 68). Oudry was a tremendous observer of animals and, at the same time, managed to design paintings with extraordinary elegance and grace.
In Oudry’s oil study on paper of the hunting hound, the very quick sketch in the lower left-hand corner reveals his close observation of these animals. Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron was completed exactly the same year as the National Gallery’s portrait of Henri-Camille, Chevalier de Beringhen (see fig. 53, p. 73), who was the chief equerry to Louis XV. Beringhen organized hunts for Louis XV and is shown as a huntsman with a red-legged partridge, hound, shotgun, and game bag on the one side. Beringhen himself had a very important collection of works of this kind by Oudry. (20)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
GENERAL DESCRIPTION:
The same sense of dramatic confrontation and heroic agency animates the Rosenberg Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, which is signed and dated 1722. The hero in this picture is a brown-and-white spaniel, depicted in a nose-to-beak confrontation with a large and aggressive heron. The dog and the bird are totally subsumed into nature, hemmed in by the threatening sky, the overwhelming vegetation, and the stream or pond at the bottom of the canvas. Oudry makes sure that we, the viewers, are immersed right along with his protagonists, by organizing the composition around an extremely low, dog’s-eye point of view. In fact, if human viewers are to be imagined as witnesses to this scene, we must be crouching in the water, plunged into the elements and following the spaniel’s lead.4
As unlikely as it may seem, Oudry’s Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron was a participant in eighteenth-century debates about worldly power, and who had the right to wield it. Not only does the painting comment on political authority and subjugation; it also challenges the more fundamental biological hierarchy between human and animal. Oudry’s painting invites us to cross the line between human and animal, and to enter into the dog’s world and the dog’s body—a radical repudiation of human hierarchies. Oudry’s painting is also a rebuke to the humanist aesthetic theories that dominated the eighteenth-century art world, and an invitation to think about animals as subjects acting in the world, rather than as objects subjugated to human control.6
Large-scale representations of the hunt, particularly ones that emphasized the interaction of dogs and their quarry, were perfected by Peter Paul Rubens and his close collaborator Frans Snyders in the early years of the seventeenth century, and taken up by many other artists.8 In the vast repertoire of Dutch and Flemish hunt scenes, there are even precedents for Oudry’s combination of dog and heron (fig. 50). Oudry was not even the first artist in France to take on the particular theme of the lone canine hunting birds—his illustrious older colleague, Alexandre-François Desportes, had already used this formula in his early eighteenth-century paintings of hunting dogs, albeit with much smaller and less threatening birds (fig. 51).
The power and purpose of Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, however, cannot be explained merely by inserting it in the history of animal painting. We can make the first steps toward a broader and more culturally resonant interpretation by situating the production of Water Spaniel and Heron in the trajectory of the artist’s career.
Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron was painted at a pivotal moment in Oudry’s career, just three years before his invitation to Versailles, when the artist was deeply invested in building his reputation as a painter of the animal world.
Oudry painted this scene without a particular buyer in mind.11 He was so proud of it that he sent it to the public Salon exhibition of 1725 and then kept it in his studio the rest of his life. While Oudry did not produce this work for a client, the animals and things depicted in it—the hooded falcons, the gun, the powder horn barely visible at right, the dead deer—clearly belong to someone. We can be even more specific: they belong to some man, because hunting, and especially shooting, in eighteenth-century France was a masculine pursuit.12 We the viewers take the position of that man, surveying what we have killed, and what still remains to be killed. Our position is an uneasy one. We may own the gun and master the falcons, but the heron poses a direct threat to our control over the picture and its contents. The heron’s vitality, its refusal to succumb to human dominance, and its insistent claim over the picture plane are in fact what distinguishes Oudry’s painting from those of his predecessors.
The expressive qualities of Oudry’s animals, and the uneasy identification between beast and man, are intensified in the artist’s depictions of dogs. Dogs featured prominently in Oudry’s representations of human hunters...
The pleasures of imagining oneself as an animal are even more evident in Oudry’s large-scale hunting scenes that starred dogs in combat with their prey...clearly appreciated by Oudry’s patrons. That pleasure, I think, has to do with the kinds of acting and being that these animals evoked. The dogs in these pictures provide surrogate bodies for their human viewers—bodies quivering with barely restrained passions, bodies that are both free and freely given over to the joint struggles of a pack of equals against a common enemy.
To buy these paintings, and to identify with these dogs, as human hunters clearly did, was to embrace animality. Here were hunters in their purest state, unencumbered by ceremony or distinctions of rank. Paintings like this allowed viewers to fantasize about a visceral kind of violence and an intense form of fraternity that was denied them by the decorum of court life and the class and gender hierarchies of eighteenth-century French society.13
Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, compared to these very typical paintings of the 1720s and 1730s, provides its viewers with a much simpler and more dramatic composition. Oudry pits two large-scale protagonists against each other in a naturalistic setting, concentrating the narrative interest rather than dispersing it. In fact, despite its putatively lower rank in the Academy hierarchy, the Oudry painting shares much more with works like the Lemoyne Bather than it does with genre painting. Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron echoes the history painter Lemoyne’s two-figure composition and individual attention to the protagonists’ bodies and gestures. Even the gesture of the foot in the water appears in both paintings, integrating the main figures into their respective landscapes and providing the viewers with palpable evidence that the protagonists are sensate beings just like us.
Oudry’s Water Spaniel, and his other animal pictures, were in fact a kind of history painting, dependent on the drama of violent conflict and the narrative power of their protagonists’ bodies. That the heroes of these paintings were dogs seems not to have detracted from their appeal to the eighteenth-century public. Paintings like Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron represent an ingenious end run around the Académie Royale’s hierarchy of genres and an invigoration of a kind of serious painting that had, despite the Academy’s best efforts, fallen out of favor by the 1720s.
In Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, there are no signs of civilization, no classical column, no gentle sunny vista, and no safely cleared foreground for the canine protagonists, and for us, to enjoy. Instead, both animal actors and human viewers are plunged into a tangle of undergrowth under a threatening, bruise-colored sky. The collars the lapdogs wear mark them instantly as pets, subjected to outside human control. The Water Spaniel, by contrast, is an independent force; its body, especially its clipped tail, bears the evidence of human care, but it wears no collar and pays no attention to anything or anyone beyond the borders of the picture plane.
The Rosenberg picture was painted at a moment of political uncertainty, when power was divided between a libertine regent, a rebellious nobility, and a twelve-year-old king. The elite men who hunted, and who bought hunting art, were searching for a visual language to channel their frustrations with the Regency and picture their political aspirations. Traditional history painting was ill-equipped to propose alternatives to the old form of absolute monarchy.26 Other forms of painting, like Pater’s fête galante or Boucher’s pastoral landscape, avoided these political thickets. Oudry plunges us right into them, asking us to think of ourselves as valiant combatants in a life-or-death battle against a powerful adversary. The visual language of the hunt, an activity tied to royal and noble privilege, is purged of all human constraint and artifice, and reduced—or rather expanded—to a battle between free and independent beings.
DOGS
...dogs themselves were serious business in the eighteenth century. As pets, as hunting companions, and as objects of luxury consumption, dogs were markers of social status and political power. Hunting dogs, especially, were symbols of a practice that was the exclusive prerogative of noblemen and royalty.2
Louis XV, in fact, was mostly interested in hunting and accumulating mistresses. But hunting itself, of course, was a way of making political authority visible. It allowed the king to demonstrate his mastery over the land and its inhabitants, both animal and human. With Louis XV’s hunting, we return to the close connection between elite men and their dogs. Louis XV loved his dogs to distraction. The walls of his private apartments were decorated with dog paintings, and the dogs themselves were often underfoot. Louis personally managed his hunting kennel and knew all of his many dogs’ names: as one courtier noted in his memoirs, “The king works like a dog for his dogs.”17 The many hunting treatises published in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer further proof of the human passion for, and identification with, dogs. Instructions on how to select, train, maintain, and talk to your dogs dominate these texts. The whole ritual of the hunt depended on dogs; as one eighteenth-century author put it, “the hunter makes the dogs, and the dogs make the hunter.”18
A brave and determined dog like Oudry’s spaniel was a very valuable commodity in the eighteenth century. Only the nobility could legally own hunting dogs, and eighteenth-century sources waxed eloquent about what made a good dog: predominately white coat, rough fur, sensitive nose, small feet, beautiful long ears.21 Oudry’s Water Spaniel is, by these criteria, a very good dog. The artist draws attention to its physical perfection by applying the paint in very evident brushstrokes on its head and ears, inviting us to look closely, even to touch. A dog like this was a product of careful breeding and training: beautiful, physically powerful, disciplined, and fearless. That list of characteristics describes both the ideal eighteenth-century nobleman—the most likely patron for a painting like this one—and the ideal protagonist of a history painting. The painter Henri Testelin, for instance, writing in 1696, advised fellow artists to depict their heroes “with small heads, thick and sinewy necks, high and broad shoulders, raised chest and breasts, small hips and stomach, muscled thighs,” a list of characteristics that apply equally well to Oudry’s canine hero.22
Oudry’s dog may be as physically fit as a human hero, but, as the painting also makes clear, a dog is a being ruled by its senses and naturally given to violence. Oudry’s dog offered its eighteenth-century viewers a picture of unrestrained animal passions and a fully embodied form of selfhood. Here was a protagonist who did not have to worry about being presented at court or paying his bills or finding advantageous marriages for his children. The dog enjoys a simpler and more linear kind of thinking: run, fight, kill.
Elite viewers, in short, liked this kind of painting because it allowed them to identify with the dog. This identification was authorized in part by early eighteenth-century thinking about animals and humans. The best-known theory of animal nature at the time Oudry painted this picture was René Descartes’s infamous “beast-machine” theory. Descartes argued for an absolute separation between animal and human nature, dismissing animals as mere automata incapable of reason or feeling. Descartes’s theory of animal life was part of his larger argument in favor of dualism—the idea that the human self is located only in the mind, unaffected by the body.23
Not everyone in the eighteenth century agreed with Descartes, however.24 The dog in particular was constantly held up by philosophers and naturalists as proof of animals’ capacity for understanding, and even their possession of a soul.
HIERARCHY OF SUBJECTS:
Still life painting occupied the bottom rung in the official hierarchy of genres established by the Académie Royale, but Oudry enlivened his still lifes of dead game with live dogs.3 Genre scenes, or pictures of everyday life, were wildly popular in eighteenth-century France, especially the ones that depicted family and motherhood.
...The Académie Royale insisted that history paintings be based on the heroic human figure, that they should involve multiple figures and a complex and edifying narrative, and that they be large in scale, to encourage public viewing.
The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was, at least in principle, the dominant force in the eighteenth-century art world. This highly selective group of artists, led by a director appointed by the king, set the standards for art production and education. As we have already seen, the Academy promoted a hierarchy of genres that privileged monumental history paintings with complex and dramatic compositions dependent on human bodies and important and instructive subject matter. Failing that, the Academy would settle for a large-scale painting that at least focused on the idealized human body, like François Lemoyne’s painting of a female bather, also in the Rosenberg Collection (see fig. 65, p. 91). Serious history painting, however, was in crisis in the first decades of the eighteenth century.15 By the early 1720s, when Oudry was working on Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, there was already a thriving private market in art that did not obey the Academy’s rules.16 In this market, the most popular kind of art was not history painting, but genre paintings like Jean-Baptiste Pater’s fanciful scene of elite men and women celebrating the grape harvest in the countryside (see fig. 58, p. 82), or François Boucher’s equally whimsical scene of a herdswoman on a pony (see fig. 76, p. 104), both in the Rosenberg Collection. These are small-scale paintings, populated by tiny, elegant human figures doing fairly ordinary things in imaginary landscapes: perfect paintings to hang in your salon, music room, or boudoir.
Excerpt from
Amy Freund, "Good Dog! Jean- Baptiste Oudry and the Politics of Animal Painting," 67-80, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
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The same sense of dramatic confrontation and heroic agency animates the Rosenberg Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, which is signed and dated 1722. The hero in this picture is a brown-and-white spaniel, depicted in a nose-to-beak confrontation with a large and aggressive heron. The dog and the bird are totally subsumed into nature, hemmed in by the threatening sky, the overwhelming vegetation, and the stream or pond at the bottom of the canvas. Oudry makes sure that we, the viewers, are immersed right along with his protagonists, by organizing the composition around an extremely low, dog’s-eye point of view. In fact, if human viewers are to be imagined as witnesses to this scene, we must be crouching in the water, plunged into the elements and following the spaniel’s lead.4
As unlikely as it may seem, Oudry’s Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron was a participant in eighteenth-century debates about worldly power, and who had the right to wield it. Not only does the painting comment on political authority and subjugation; it also challenges the more fundamental biological hierarchy between human and animal. Oudry’s painting invites us to cross the line between human and animal, and to enter into the dog’s world and the dog’s body—a radical repudiation of human hierarchies. Oudry’s painting is also a rebuke to the humanist aesthetic theories that dominated the eighteenth-century art world, and an invitation to think about animals as subjects acting in the world, rather than as objects subjugated to human control.6
Large-scale representations of the hunt, particularly ones that emphasized the interaction of dogs and their quarry, were perfected by Peter Paul Rubens and his close collaborator Frans Snyders in the early years of the seventeenth century, and taken up by many other artists.8 In the vast repertoire of Dutch and Flemish hunt scenes, there are even precedents for Oudry’s combination of dog and heron (fig. 50). Oudry was not even the first artist in France to take on the particular theme of the lone canine hunting birds—his illustrious older colleague, Alexandre-François Desportes, had already used this formula in his early eighteenth-century paintings of hunting dogs, albeit with much smaller and less threatening birds (fig. 51).
The power and purpose of Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, however, cannot be explained merely by inserting it in the history of animal painting. We can make the first steps toward a broader and more culturally resonant interpretation by situating the production of Water Spaniel and Heron in the trajectory of the artist’s career.
Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron was painted at a pivotal moment in Oudry’s career, just three years before his invitation to Versailles, when the artist was deeply invested in building his reputation as a painter of the animal world.
Oudry painted this scene without a particular buyer in mind.11 He was so proud of it that he sent it to the public Salon exhibition of 1725 and then kept it in his studio the rest of his life. While Oudry did not produce this work for a client, the animals and things depicted in it—the hooded falcons, the gun, the powder horn barely visible at right, the dead deer—clearly belong to someone. We can be even more specific: they belong to some man, because hunting, and especially shooting, in eighteenth-century France was a masculine pursuit.12 We the viewers take the position of that man, surveying what we have killed, and what still remains to be killed. Our position is an uneasy one. We may own the gun and master the falcons, but the heron poses a direct threat to our control over the picture and its contents. The heron’s vitality, its refusal to succumb to human dominance, and its insistent claim over the picture plane are in fact what distinguishes Oudry’s painting from those of his predecessors.
The expressive qualities of Oudry’s animals, and the uneasy identification between beast and man, are intensified in the artist’s depictions of dogs. Dogs featured prominently in Oudry’s representations of human hunters...
The pleasures of imagining oneself as an animal are even more evident in Oudry’s large-scale hunting scenes that starred dogs in combat with their prey...clearly appreciated by Oudry’s patrons. That pleasure, I think, has to do with the kinds of acting and being that these animals evoked. The dogs in these pictures provide surrogate bodies for their human viewers—bodies quivering with barely restrained passions, bodies that are both free and freely given over to the joint struggles of a pack of equals against a common enemy.
To buy these paintings, and to identify with these dogs, as human hunters clearly did, was to embrace animality. Here were hunters in their purest state, unencumbered by ceremony or distinctions of rank. Paintings like this allowed viewers to fantasize about a visceral kind of violence and an intense form of fraternity that was denied them by the decorum of court life and the class and gender hierarchies of eighteenth-century French society.13
Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, compared to these very typical paintings of the 1720s and 1730s, provides its viewers with a much simpler and more dramatic composition. Oudry pits two large-scale protagonists against each other in a naturalistic setting, concentrating the narrative interest rather than dispersing it. In fact, despite its putatively lower rank in the Academy hierarchy, the Oudry painting shares much more with works like the Lemoyne Bather than it does with genre painting. Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron echoes the history painter Lemoyne’s two-figure composition and individual attention to the protagonists’ bodies and gestures. Even the gesture of the foot in the water appears in both paintings, integrating the main figures into their respective landscapes and providing the viewers with palpable evidence that the protagonists are sensate beings just like us.
Oudry’s Water Spaniel, and his other animal pictures, were in fact a kind of history painting, dependent on the drama of violent conflict and the narrative power of their protagonists’ bodies. That the heroes of these paintings were dogs seems not to have detracted from their appeal to the eighteenth-century public. Paintings like Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron represent an ingenious end run around the Académie Royale’s hierarchy of genres and an invigoration of a kind of serious painting that had, despite the Academy’s best efforts, fallen out of favor by the 1720s.
In Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, there are no signs of civilization, no classical column, no gentle sunny vista, and no safely cleared foreground for the canine protagonists, and for us, to enjoy. Instead, both animal actors and human viewers are plunged into a tangle of undergrowth under a threatening, bruise-colored sky. The collars the lapdogs wear mark them instantly as pets, subjected to outside human control. The Water Spaniel, by contrast, is an independent force; its body, especially its clipped tail, bears the evidence of human care, but it wears no collar and pays no attention to anything or anyone beyond the borders of the picture plane.
The Rosenberg picture was painted at a moment of political uncertainty, when power was divided between a libertine regent, a rebellious nobility, and a twelve-year-old king. The elite men who hunted, and who bought hunting art, were searching for a visual language to channel their frustrations with the Regency and picture their political aspirations. Traditional history painting was ill-equipped to propose alternatives to the old form of absolute monarchy.26 Other forms of painting, like Pater’s fête galante or Boucher’s pastoral landscape, avoided these political thickets. Oudry plunges us right into them, asking us to think of ourselves as valiant combatants in a life-or-death battle against a powerful adversary. The visual language of the hunt, an activity tied to royal and noble privilege, is purged of all human constraint and artifice, and reduced—or rather expanded—to a battle between free and independent beings.
DOGS
...dogs themselves were serious business in the eighteenth century. As pets, as hunting companions, and as objects of luxury consumption, dogs were markers of social status and political power. Hunting dogs, especially, were symbols of a practice that was the exclusive prerogative of noblemen and royalty.2
Louis XV, in fact, was mostly interested in hunting and accumulating mistresses. But hunting itself, of course, was a way of making political authority visible. It allowed the king to demonstrate his mastery over the land and its inhabitants, both animal and human. With Louis XV’s hunting, we return to the close connection between elite men and their dogs. Louis XV loved his dogs to distraction. The walls of his private apartments were decorated with dog paintings, and the dogs themselves were often underfoot. Louis personally managed his hunting kennel and knew all of his many dogs’ names: as one courtier noted in his memoirs, “The king works like a dog for his dogs.”17 The many hunting treatises published in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer further proof of the human passion for, and identification with, dogs. Instructions on how to select, train, maintain, and talk to your dogs dominate these texts. The whole ritual of the hunt depended on dogs; as one eighteenth-century author put it, “the hunter makes the dogs, and the dogs make the hunter.”18
A brave and determined dog like Oudry’s spaniel was a very valuable commodity in the eighteenth century. Only the nobility could legally own hunting dogs, and eighteenth-century sources waxed eloquent about what made a good dog: predominately white coat, rough fur, sensitive nose, small feet, beautiful long ears.21 Oudry’s Water Spaniel is, by these criteria, a very good dog. The artist draws attention to its physical perfection by applying the paint in very evident brushstrokes on its head and ears, inviting us to look closely, even to touch. A dog like this was a product of careful breeding and training: beautiful, physically powerful, disciplined, and fearless. That list of characteristics describes both the ideal eighteenth-century nobleman—the most likely patron for a painting like this one—and the ideal protagonist of a history painting. The painter Henri Testelin, for instance, writing in 1696, advised fellow artists to depict their heroes “with small heads, thick and sinewy necks, high and broad shoulders, raised chest and breasts, small hips and stomach, muscled thighs,” a list of characteristics that apply equally well to Oudry’s canine hero.22
Oudry’s dog may be as physically fit as a human hero, but, as the painting also makes clear, a dog is a being ruled by its senses and naturally given to violence. Oudry’s dog offered its eighteenth-century viewers a picture of unrestrained animal passions and a fully embodied form of selfhood. Here was a protagonist who did not have to worry about being presented at court or paying his bills or finding advantageous marriages for his children. The dog enjoys a simpler and more linear kind of thinking: run, fight, kill.
Elite viewers, in short, liked this kind of painting because it allowed them to identify with the dog. This identification was authorized in part by early eighteenth-century thinking about animals and humans. The best-known theory of animal nature at the time Oudry painted this picture was René Descartes’s infamous “beast-machine” theory. Descartes argued for an absolute separation between animal and human nature, dismissing animals as mere automata incapable of reason or feeling. Descartes’s theory of animal life was part of his larger argument in favor of dualism—the idea that the human self is located only in the mind, unaffected by the body.23
Not everyone in the eighteenth century agreed with Descartes, however.24 The dog in particular was constantly held up by philosophers and naturalists as proof of animals’ capacity for understanding, and even their possession of a soul.
HIERARCHY OF SUBJECTS:
Still life painting occupied the bottom rung in the official hierarchy of genres established by the Académie Royale, but Oudry enlivened his still lifes of dead game with live dogs.3 Genre scenes, or pictures of everyday life, were wildly popular in eighteenth-century France, especially the ones that depicted family and motherhood.
...The Académie Royale insisted that history paintings be based on the heroic human figure, that they should involve multiple figures and a complex and edifying narrative, and that they be large in scale, to encourage public viewing.
The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was, at least in principle, the dominant force in the eighteenth-century art world. This highly selective group of artists, led by a director appointed by the king, set the standards for art production and education. As we have already seen, the Academy promoted a hierarchy of genres that privileged monumental history paintings with complex and dramatic compositions dependent on human bodies and important and instructive subject matter. Failing that, the Academy would settle for a large-scale painting that at least focused on the idealized human body, like François Lemoyne’s painting of a female bather, also in the Rosenberg Collection (see fig. 65, p. 91). Serious history painting, however, was in crisis in the first decades of the eighteenth century.15 By the early 1720s, when Oudry was working on Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron, there was already a thriving private market in art that did not obey the Academy’s rules.16 In this market, the most popular kind of art was not history painting, but genre paintings like Jean-Baptiste Pater’s fanciful scene of elite men and women celebrating the grape harvest in the countryside (see fig. 58, p. 82), or François Boucher’s equally whimsical scene of a herdswoman on a pony (see fig. 76, p. 104), both in the Rosenberg Collection. These are small-scale paintings, populated by tiny, elegant human figures doing fairly ordinary things in imaginary landscapes: perfect paintings to hang in your salon, music room, or boudoir.
Excerpt from
Amy Freund, "Good Dog! Jean- Baptiste Oudry and the Politics of Animal Painting," 67-80, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
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We are face to face with a ferocious heron confronting a snarling water spaniel in this almost life-sized painting. The artist's keen understanding of the characteristics of each species allows us to believe this staged scene could almost be real.
Heather MacDonald, August 2010
This monumental canvas is an excellent example of the kind of animal painting by which Oudry secured his reputation during the early part of his career. Although a prolific artist, who treated subjects that included history painting, portraiture, landscape, hunting scenes, and simple still life, Oudry's celebrity derived from his animal paintings. This had not a little to do with the great interest taken in the painter by Louis XV, who, recognizing Oudry's special ability to capture the nuance of feather and fur, rewarded him with numerous commissions for animal subjects. The King's love of the hunt is well documented. It is therefore no accident that so many of Oudry's most important commissions depict either the King's hunting escapades, or the exotic animals from the royal menagerie, or the huge stag antlers that the King commanded him to paint as a record of his many trophies of the hunt. Although as a type of subject matter, still-life painting was traditionally less esteemed than those categories of painting that required the representation of the human form, Oudry's inventions won him numerous academic honors and royal privileges, including the directorship of the Beauvais tapestry works.
The Rosenberg Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron may be the prime version of a composition the artist chose to treat twice. Another version of the same composition is now preserved in the Museum of Art and History, Geneva. The replication by an artist of an earlier compositional invention was a common practice in the 18th century, and attests to the popular success of an artist's idea. Oudry's innovative approach to the specialized genre of animal painting is well instanced in this work. Each element of the composition is carefully disposed to achieve a decorative surface pattern of interlacing curved lines. And yet, at the same time, a high degree of illusion is also obtained through the artist's subtle understanding of local color and textural effects. Oudry's coloristic intelligence was a much admired aspect of his painting. But, perhaps even more innovative to his 18th-century viewers was Oudry's ability to infuse an element of dramatic movement in his animal paintings. In this composition, the mingled anxiety and ferociousness of the gangly heron is captured to great effect, as it tries to intimidate the snarling water spaniel with its enormous wing-span and spear-like bill. By applying the same rules of dramatic unity and expressive force that were demanded of the history painter, Oudry effectively elevated the lowly subject matter of animal painting, imbuing it with a greater pictorial interest and complexity.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 23-24.
OUDRY:
Mr. Rosenberg was also quite interested in the more realistic aspect of eighteenth-century art. He bought two very dramatic compositions with animals, Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron (see fig. 49, p. 69) and Study of a Hound Baying (see fig. 55, p. 74), both by Jean-Baptiste Oudry. A major painter of still life and especially of hunting and animal subjects, Oudry depicted an almost violent confrontation between a heron, beautifully observed, and a water spaniel. This is a very typical kind of picture by Oudry, who was the favorite painter of Louis XV, given the king’s love for hunting, more than anything else. Oudry did a whole series of great tapestry cartoons of Louis XV and the hunt (see fig. 80, p. 115), as well as very affectionate and affecting portraits of Louis’s hunting hounds and other animals (see fig. 47, p. 68). Oudry was a tremendous observer of animals and, at the same time, managed to design paintings with extraordinary elegance and grace.
In Oudry’s oil study on paper of the hunting hound, the very quick sketch in the lower left-hand corner reveals his close observation of these animals. Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron was completed exactly the same year as the National Gallery’s portrait of Henri-Camille, Chevalier de Beringhen (see fig. 53, p. 73), who was the chief equerry to Louis XV. Beringhen organized hunts for Louis XV and is shown as a huntsman with a red-legged partridge, hound, shotgun, and game bag on the one side. Beringhen himself had a very important collection of works of this kind by Oudry. (20)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
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