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Lot Essay
This study of a wild boar is typical of Oudry's approach to nature wherein he combines careful observation with sentiment intended to appeal to human sensibilities. The viewer's capacity for sympathy or horror is automatically transferred to the animal subject, whether an individual study or a large composition. This work cannot be connected with any known tapestry design or painting of battling or hunted boars. However, a fully finished drawing, Combat of lions and wild boars, signed and dated 1745 (Montpellier, Muse Atger), shows a male attacked by lions while the sow tries to protect their young. Oudry would have used a study such as the present sheet (and part of his studio stock) to create the more complex composition.
During the 1720s Oudry often observed animals in the royal menagerie at Versailles. In his drawings the artist aspired to a high degree of finish, whether or not he had a specific purpose in mind. These served as models from which other drawings could be made, following Oudry's sound business sense and the increased demand from collectors. The catalogue raisonns by Locquin and Opperman list more than a dozen studies and compositions with boars cited in 18th Century sales, but none can be connected definitively with the present drawing. Count Tessin owned two, one of which (Locquin 842) is analogous: Un sanglier, couch sur le flanc gauche, il regarde vers la droite. It remains unclear whether this was engraved by Rehn and LeBas with the other animal studies in Tessin's collection, only four of which survive (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). Opperman (op.cit.) tentatively connects the present work with one of the studies listed in the Lempereur sale (24 May - 28 June 1773): no. 684 L'tude d'un loup cervier, et celle d'un sanglier, pientes la huile sur papier, or no. 686, Trois tudes qui sont un lopard, un sanglier, et une hure de sanglier. The former lot was sold to Basan; the latter to Chariot. The precise technique, especially the use of white to pick out the bristles/hairs and degree of finish might have misled the cataloguer into describing Lempereur's studies as oil sketches in the tradition of Desportes.
The largest collection of paintings and drawings by Oudry, bought directly from the artist, is in the Staatliches Museum, Schwerin. Unfortunately there is no systematic catalogue or photographic record of this collection. The present drawing was unknown to Jean Locquin when he published his doctoral thesis in 1912, but his catalogue does not include the Tessin and Lempereur drawings (J. Locquin, Catalogue raisonn de l'oeuvre de Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Peintre du Roi, Paris 1912, nos. 780, 781 and 842).
In the 18th Century, academically educated artists and collectors would have interpreted the isolated image of a seated boar as a reference to the bronze fountain known as Il Porcellino, in the Mercato Nuovo, Florence. Pietro Tacca (1577-1640) made the model from which the bronze was cast in the 1630s, copied from a life-size hellenistic marble belonging to Cosimo I de'Medici, which is at the Uffizi. Academies taught artists not only to study the life model, but to think in terms of precedents. Artists travelling in Florence would have known the fountain first hand. Oudry, whose primary training was at the Acadmie de Saint-Luc, away from the rhetorical doctrines of the official Acadmie Royale, did not have this opportunity. If he knew Tacca's statue at all, it was from one of the popular bronze reductions made throughout the 17th Century. However, in one of the many inconsistencies of his life, Oudry also took classes at the Acadmie Royale, where he later became a full member, reu in 1719. He was a genre painter and specialist in animal subjects, an artist of great virtuosity but, strictly speaking, outside the doctrines of the Acadmie Royale. But, in all his work, he relied on drawing - not only as a means but also as an end - in the true academic tradition.
During the 1720s Oudry often observed animals in the royal menagerie at Versailles. In his drawings the artist aspired to a high degree of finish, whether or not he had a specific purpose in mind. These served as models from which other drawings could be made, following Oudry's sound business sense and the increased demand from collectors. The catalogue raisonns by Locquin and Opperman list more than a dozen studies and compositions with boars cited in 18th Century sales, but none can be connected definitively with the present drawing. Count Tessin owned two, one of which (Locquin 842) is analogous: Un sanglier, couch sur le flanc gauche, il regarde vers la droite. It remains unclear whether this was engraved by Rehn and LeBas with the other animal studies in Tessin's collection, only four of which survive (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). Opperman (op.cit.) tentatively connects the present work with one of the studies listed in the Lempereur sale (24 May - 28 June 1773): no. 684 L'tude d'un loup cervier, et celle d'un sanglier, pientes la huile sur papier, or no. 686, Trois tudes qui sont un lopard, un sanglier, et une hure de sanglier. The former lot was sold to Basan; the latter to Chariot. The precise technique, especially the use of white to pick out the bristles/hairs and degree of finish might have misled the cataloguer into describing Lempereur's studies as oil sketches in the tradition of Desportes.
The largest collection of paintings and drawings by Oudry, bought directly from the artist, is in the Staatliches Museum, Schwerin. Unfortunately there is no systematic catalogue or photographic record of this collection. The present drawing was unknown to Jean Locquin when he published his doctoral thesis in 1912, but his catalogue does not include the Tessin and Lempereur drawings (J. Locquin, Catalogue raisonn de l'oeuvre de Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Peintre du Roi, Paris 1912, nos. 780, 781 and 842).
In the 18th Century, academically educated artists and collectors would have interpreted the isolated image of a seated boar as a reference to the bronze fountain known as Il Porcellino, in the Mercato Nuovo, Florence. Pietro Tacca (1577-1640) made the model from which the bronze was cast in the 1630s, copied from a life-size hellenistic marble belonging to Cosimo I de'Medici, which is at the Uffizi. Academies taught artists not only to study the life model, but to think in terms of precedents. Artists travelling in Florence would have known the fountain first hand. Oudry, whose primary training was at the Acadmie de Saint-Luc, away from the rhetorical doctrines of the official Acadmie Royale, did not have this opportunity. If he knew Tacca's statue at all, it was from one of the popular bronze reductions made throughout the 17th Century. However, in one of the many inconsistencies of his life, Oudry also took classes at the Acadmie Royale, where he later became a full member, reu in 1719. He was a genre painter and specialist in animal subjects, an artist of great virtuosity but, strictly speaking, outside the doctrines of the Acadmie Royale. But, in all his work, he relied on drawing - not only as a means but also as an end - in the true academic tradition.