Dog Guarding Dead Game

Oudry made his reputation painting hunting scenes and royal animals for Louis XV and various wealthy Parisian patrons. The verisimilitude with which he renders the creatures epitomizes his precise painterly style; he specifically identifies the game as a fox, a wood pigeon, a woodpecker, a curlew, and a jay.

Although he trained with the portraitist Nicolas de Largillierre (1656–1746), Jean Baptiste Oudry found fame as the painter of hunting scenes, still lifes, and animals. He was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture as a history painter in 1719. Among his most important royal commissions were a large canvas representing Louis XV (1710–1774) hunting in the forest of Saint-Germain in 1730 (Musée des Augustins, Toulouse) and designs for tapestries depicting royal hunts which he began to paint shortly thereafter. These celebrated tapestries were woven at the Gobelins manufactory, of which Oudry later became inspector; he had been appointed director of the royal tapestry manufactory at Beauvais in 1734.

In Dog Guarding Dead Game the spoils of a hunt are laid out in front of a stone ruin in a wooded landscape. Oudry described them as a fox, a wood pigeon, a woodpecker, a curlew, and a jay. The verisimilitude with which the game is rendered is characteristic: Oudry was said to have borrowed fine vegetables and game from a Paris grocer to study. The painting was exhibited at Oudry's last Salon, in 1753, with Ducks Resting in Sunshine (The Met, 71.57). Although the two were not conceived as pendants, they were hung together by the prominent collector Ange Laurent de La Live de Jully (1725–1779).

Katharine Baetjer 2013
(Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art)