Jean-Baptiste Oudry, 1686-1755

By Zachary Vincent

Still Life with Fruits, Celery, and a Porcelain Bowl, oil on canvas, 1725. Staatliches Museum Schwerin.

Scholars of the 18th century in Europe face unrelenting pressure to justify the relevance of their studies today. Art historians may feel this pressure even more acutely, given the widespread focus on stylistic transformations which took place earlier, as the Early Modern period yielded stylistic innovation, and which took place later at the end of the century, with the dominance of Neo-Classicism and the beginnings of Romanticism. It sometimes feels as though there is a popular place for only a few artists of note from the first half of the century – for an artist like Jean Siméon Chardin, say. Where does this leave Chardin’s contemporary in Louis XV’s France, the once-esteemed Jean-Baptiste Oudry? Chardin has been a focus of scholarship due to his perceived Social Realism, which has been classed as standing out from the Rococo’s usual “images of frivolity and pleasure,” as noted by one Chardin scholar. Negotiations for Oudry’s place in popular scholarship of 18th century France has revolved around the places his art goes beyond “frivolity and pleasure” as a result. Yet looking beyond Oudry’s landscapes, noble portraits, and still lives for some evidence of engagement with the social class and with political themes ignores one of the most obvious routes to making Oudry newly relevant: global and imperial themes lurking behind the apparently frivolous and the pleasing. What if exploring such themes could help us find new meaning in Oudry’s art and in the wider Rococo?

Jean-Baptiste Oudry was born the 17th of March 1686 in Paris. Much of his early exposure to art came from his father, who worked as a painter and art dealer. Such experience primed the young Oudry for study at the Académie de Saint-Luc and the Académie royale. Following official study, Oudry trained with Nicolas de Largillierre, the famed colourist, and began painting the scenes for which he would become most famous: animals and The Hunt. Oudry’s success led him to become affiliated closely with King Louis XV, who commissioned nine tapestries from the artist depicting hunting scenes and who, in 1736, made Oudry head of the famed Gobelins tapestry manufactory. Throughout his career, Oudry executed commissions for royal families in Sweden, Russia, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and others. He remained famed in and beyond France until his death from a stroke in April of 1755 at the age of 69.

While Oudry may appear as a decisively French artist, his themes and influences are far more global than the above biography would suggest. Oudry’s 1725 Still Life with Fruits, Celery, and a Porcelain Bowl, for example, offers viewers a glance into an 18th century world in which trade and a demand for East Asian luxury goods was quickly transforming European high society and its tastes. The bowl depicted by Oudry was owned by the artist and was eventually sold alongside a number of collected East Asian goods for 9000 livres. Such representation was part of Oudry’s commitment to working almost exclusively from life, setting him apart from many of his contemporaries. The painting is significant beyond its demonstration of Oudry’s personal style (strong lighting, attention to detail in texture, etc.). By using the classic European genre of still life to depict a bowl created by artisans thousands of miles away alongside such classic French agricultural products as grapes and celery, Oudry domesticates the foreign and naturalises its presence in a French setting. The work gives insight into a populace adjusting to the presence of foreign goods and coming to claim them, and France’s ability to acquire them, as part of the natural order of things. A bowl becomes a symbol of France’s control of global trade at a time of imperial expansion.

Landscape with Lake and Horsement, date unknown, brush, brown wash, and white highlighting on brown paper. Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture.

Landscape with Lake and Horsemen (date unknown) is evidence of Oudry’s engagement with a different part of East Asia: its artistic style. The use of brush and ink, the simultaneous generation of light and perspective through shading, and the fluid rendering of such natural features as rocks, bluffs, and leaves, suggest an engagement with compositional and stylistic techniques associated with East Asia from at least the 16th century. Whether the scene is meant to be in France or China is entirely ambiguous, specificity submerged in the interest of global stylistic experimentation. Such a work stands in stark contrast from many of Oudry’s other sketches and drawings, as well as those of most of his fellow Rococo painters. Yet 18th century France was demonstrably eager to connect with Asia in more ways than collecting its porcelain, and Oudry’s art is evidence of that complex and multifaceted engagement with foreign cultures which would continue to be a theme in French art in Neo-Classical and Romantic works.

Les Deux Aventuriers et le Talisman, 1732, brush, ink, paint, and gouache on blue paper. Private Collection.

Jean Baptiste Oudry was not alone in engaging with foreign goods and styles in 18th century France, as the many artistic adaptations of Jean la Fontaine’s story Les Deux Aventuriers et le Talisman shows. But Oudry, through his prolific practice (he produced at least 1,000 paintings in his 40+ year career) and willingness to work across genres, may be best able to give modern scholars a means of understanding how France understood its place in a global world in the 18th century and how a single artist could feel a sense of responsibility for recording, from his own unique point of view, a world in flux.

Bibliography

‘Jean-Baptiste Oudry.’ Getty Museum Collection. Accessed 11th March 2025. https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103JYQ.

‘Jean-Baptiste Oudry.’ National Gallery of Art, USA. Accessed 11th March 2025. https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.2670.html.

‘Landscape with Lake and Horsemen.’ National Galleries Scotland. Accessed 11th March 2025. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/19682.

Nicholson, Paul J. ‘Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, The Kitchen Maid, 1738.’ Occupational Medicine 73 (2023): 388-390. https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqac039.

Opperman, Hal. J.-B. Oudry: 1686-1755 (Kimbell Art Museum, 1983).