Oudry valued his drawings greatly. He rarely gave them away and deliberately kept them off the market, so that by his death his drawings were reportedly of the greatest rarity. Yet Oudry was a compulsive draftsman who drew at night, when he could no longer paint. He frequently drew black and white chalk studies of birds, which appear to have been drawn for their own sake. Opperman dates these sheets, especially those in freer technique to the 1730s. In 1734, Oudry had been appointed director of the Beauvais tapestry manufacture and therefore had access to animal studies by Pieter Boel, Nicasius and Charles Lebrun of which he made frequent copies