Two cocks fighting in a farmyard, a pheasant and two hens nearby

Alexandre-François Desportes was the leading painter of animals and still lifes in France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Trained in the Flemish tradition of animal painting, he helped to popularise the dramatic hunting scenes of artists like Frans Snyders, Paul de Vos and Jan Fyt in France, often copying their compositions in part or whole in his own works.

The present painting is one such instance of Desportes’ indebtedness to his Flemish predecessors. Further examples include his large-scale Wolf hunt (private collection; see de Lastic and Jacky, op. cit., no. P 654), which was probably inspired by Snyders, and the even larger Boar hunt (Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris; see de Lastic and Jacky, op. cit., no. P 683), which repeats either the composition of a painting by Snyders in a private collection in Barcelona or one of at least six known variants (see Robels, op. cit., no. 225a-f). The two fighting cocks in the central foreground of this painting derive from a Snyders composition of 1625, which is equally known through at least two variants (see Robels, nos. 205 and 205a; see also the studio version that was unknown to Robels and most recently offered Christie’s, Amsterdam, 17 November 2015, lot 42). A preparatory drawing for the animal group is also in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 00.9-40). Whereas Snyders’ painting opens entirely onto a verdant landscape with a farmhouse, Desportes has largely enclosed his composition through the inclusion of a rustic wall and substitutes the cock at right with a pheasant and two hens in the painting’s middle ground.