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Lot Essay
It is hard to think of a more fortunate encounter between a painter and a literary work than that between the greatest of French animaliers, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and the fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695). Among the most widely admired poems in French literature, they still delight every child who gets to learn them at school, and rare are those with a French education who cannot recite, long after having left school, at least some verses of La Cigale et la fourmi (‘The Cicada and the Ant’) or Le Corbeau et le renard (‘The Crow and the Fox’). Throughout his career, Oudry produced paintings which took inspiration from one or another of the fables, such as The Fox and the Grapes from 1725, formerly in the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, the Lion and the Fly from 1732 at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (inv. NM 862), a pair of paintings made in 1747 for the decoration of the Dauphin’s appartement in Versailles from 1747 (inv. MV 6212, MV 6213), and numerous other canvases (Opperman, op. cit., 1977, I, nos. P51-PP85, II, figs. 121, 177, 178, 200, 223, 424; and Opperman, op. cit., 1982-1983, nos. 86, ill.). It was, however, in an extended series of 275 drawings that he measured himself fully with La Fontaine’s fables, proving himself in the process to be as gifted a storyteller, a poet and a wit as was his literary predecessor. The album offered here (Figs. 1 and 2), which includes the first half of Oudry’s illustrations for the fables and which is the only one to be preserved intact, is at the same time a monument to the artist’s mastery and playfulness, and homage to an undisputed masterpiece of French poetry.
As recounted by Oudry’s first biographer, the Abbé Louis Gougenot, in a manuscript from 1761, written shortly after the artist’s death (but published only in 1854), the drawings were ‘only the fruit of the evenings of two winters’ (op. cit., p. 380: ‘cet ouvrage […] n’est le fruit que des soirées de deux hivers’). In fact, as the dates on the drawings indicate, they were made over a period of five years, between 1729 and 1734, but it is indeed possible that Oudry worked on them at night, while during the day he created his paintings, as well as the designs for tapestries which preoccupied him for much of the 1730s (Opperman, op. cit., 1982-1983, pp. 126-156). The dates also show that he worked through the 243 fables, divided into five books, in the order intended by La Fontaine. The idiosyncratic technique of the drawings – brush and gray or sometimes brown ink, skilfully heightened with white bodycolor on blue paper – lends the scenes an almost nocturnal feeling, even if most are actually set during the day. A trompe-l’œil frame, consisting of black pen lines and blue wash on the drawings’ primary support, heightens this impression, and makes the drawings unique and immediately recognizable among Oudry’s substantial output as a draftsman, and among French drawings of the period in general.
It seems Oudry did not intend his drawings for any other purpose than his own enjoyment; the preface of the edition discussed below specifies that he ‘made them for his own pleasure, and in those moments of joy and fancy when an artist vividly captures the ideas inspired by his subject, and when he gives free rein to his genius’ (Fables choisies, mises en vers, I, Paris, 1755, p. iv: ‘les composoit pour son propre plaisir, & dans ces momens de joie & de fantaisie où un Artiste saisit vivement les idées de son sujet, & donne un libre essor à son génie’). But the idea to make them into prints to illustrate La Fontaine’s text must been an obvious one. Probably around 1750, some twenty years after Oudry started working on his drawings, the printmaker Gabriel Huquier brought out a first set of twelve prints under the title Livre d’animaux (Fig. 3; see Opperman, op. cit., 1982-1983, p. 158). Shortly afterwards, the Paris publisher Jean-Louis Regnard de Montenault acquired the series, completed in 1752 with a frontispiece which opens the first volume. However, the painterly quality of Oudry’s style made the drawings less suited to serve as direct models for the engravers, and Montenault commissioned Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger (1715-1790) to copy the compositions in a more linear style in graphite (for two examples in the collection of Jean Bonna, see N. Strasser, Dessins français du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, Geneva, 2016, no. 64, ill.; and for one at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (inv. 41139), see Couturier, op. cit., no. 39, ill.). Cochin, in association with more than forty other printmakers, produced the elegant engravings to which the edition brought out by Montenault still owes its reputation as one of the most magnificently illustrated books of the eighteenth century (Fig. 4). The first three volumes appeared speedily in 1755 and 1756, but the costs of the undertaking were so high that the fourth and final volume, of which the title page is dated 1759, was published probably only in 1760, thanks to a substantial grant from King Louis XV himself (Opperman, op. cit., 1977, II, p. 684).
The engravings generally reproduce the drawings’ compositions faithfully, although in some of them changes were introduced: a small number do not reverse the original composition, meaning Cochin must have reversed them in his drawing after them (nos. 5, 9, 19, 37, 63); and sometimes details were altered, as in drawing 88, or in the frontispiece (no. 1), where the bust admired by the hunchbacked Aesop and a grouping of animals appears in the drawing to represent Louis XV, whereas in the engraving he is recognizable as La Fontaine. What the prints fail to capture, however, is the spirited execution of Oudry’s originals: the agility of the brushwork, the effective use of darker accents, and the subtlety and playfulness of the white heightening.
It is ironic that the compositions, which played an important role in establishing Oudry’s reputation (Opperman, op. cit., 1977, II, pp. 157-158), were better known to his modern admirers from the prints than from the original drawings before the sale of the two albums in 1973, and even afterwards most drawings were not reproduced. The scholar and dealer Claus Virch, who bought both albums, dismembered the second one, containing drawings made between 1732 and 1734, and individual sheets from it found their way to numerous museums in Europe and in particular in North America (see, for instance, Te Rijdt, op. cit., nos. 20-21, ill.; and Grasselli, op. cit., no. 48, ill.), and to private collections such as Jeffrey Horvitz’s (Clark, op. cit., 2017, no. 13, ill., p. 621, nos. A.822, A.823, ill.; Clark, op. cit., 2022, no. 52, ill.); and they regularly appear on the market (recent examples sold Sotheby’s, New York, 31 January 2018, lot 6; Christie’s, New York, 30 October 2018, lot 256; and Sotheby’s, London, 29 July 2020, lots 225 and 226). Virch left intact the first album, with the drawings made between 1729 and 1731, sold it on to the British Rail Pension Fund, which in its turn offered the album for sale in 1996. Few have had an occasion to see it, and it had not been photographed in its entirety before the preparations of the present sale. A reproduction of all drawings in the first album is available on www.christies.com.
Those who take the time to leaf through the album – in person or virtually – are greatly rewarded. Oudry is a faithful illustrator of La Fontaine’s text, providing at least one drawing for each fable, in some cases two, and in one case even five. While in some instances, he found models for his compositions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illustrations of Aesop’s fables (Opperman, op. cit., 1977, II, p. 684), and while other sources can still be discovered, as a whole the series of drawings stands out for its inventiveness and freshness of inspiration. Oudry exploits his talent in depicting ‘as actors performing in established roles in the same way history painters were trained to compose their human actors’ (C. Giviskos in exhib. cat., Los Angeles, Houston, and Schwerin, op. cit., p. 88). But the poems also feature contemporary men and women, and Oudry stages them, both in interior and exterior scenes, like a skilled director. It is perhaps these exterior scenes, many of them in rural settings, that surprise the viewer most when given the opportunity to take in the riches of the album. They offer a unique panorama of the French countryside in the eighteenth century – sometimes realistic, sometimes less so, but always enchanting. They also enrich our understanding of Oudry’s gift as a landscapist in a different way than do the backgrounds in his paintings or tapestry designs, or than his famous drawn views of the park at Arcueil (X. Salmon et al., À l’ombre des frondaisons d’Arcueil. Dessiner un jardin du XVIIIe siècle, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2016, passim). Alongside a smaller number of scenes set in bourgeois houses or more modest farmer’s dwellings, they provide a poetic atmosphere for the amusing tales and moralizing messages of La Fontaine, of which the richness can only be fully appreciated when seeing a great number of drawings in succession. Only the album presented here still provides this possibility, securing its place in eighteenth-century French art as a graphic masterpiece inspired by a literary classic from the seventeenth century.
Figs. 1 and 2. The album’s eighteenth-century binding.
Fig. 3. Gabriel Huquier, after Jean-Baptiste Oudry, The Fox and the Stork. Etching. British Museum, London.
Fig. 4. Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers, 4 vols., Paris, 1755-1759 (or 1760). Copy sold at The Exceptional Sale 2022, Christie’s, Paris, 22 November 2022, lot 28.
As recounted by Oudry’s first biographer, the Abbé Louis Gougenot, in a manuscript from 1761, written shortly after the artist’s death (but published only in 1854), the drawings were ‘only the fruit of the evenings of two winters’ (op. cit., p. 380: ‘cet ouvrage […] n’est le fruit que des soirées de deux hivers’). In fact, as the dates on the drawings indicate, they were made over a period of five years, between 1729 and 1734, but it is indeed possible that Oudry worked on them at night, while during the day he created his paintings, as well as the designs for tapestries which preoccupied him for much of the 1730s (Opperman, op. cit., 1982-1983, pp. 126-156). The dates also show that he worked through the 243 fables, divided into five books, in the order intended by La Fontaine. The idiosyncratic technique of the drawings – brush and gray or sometimes brown ink, skilfully heightened with white bodycolor on blue paper – lends the scenes an almost nocturnal feeling, even if most are actually set during the day. A trompe-l’œil frame, consisting of black pen lines and blue wash on the drawings’ primary support, heightens this impression, and makes the drawings unique and immediately recognizable among Oudry’s substantial output as a draftsman, and among French drawings of the period in general.
It seems Oudry did not intend his drawings for any other purpose than his own enjoyment; the preface of the edition discussed below specifies that he ‘made them for his own pleasure, and in those moments of joy and fancy when an artist vividly captures the ideas inspired by his subject, and when he gives free rein to his genius’ (Fables choisies, mises en vers, I, Paris, 1755, p. iv: ‘les composoit pour son propre plaisir, & dans ces momens de joie & de fantaisie où un Artiste saisit vivement les idées de son sujet, & donne un libre essor à son génie’). But the idea to make them into prints to illustrate La Fontaine’s text must been an obvious one. Probably around 1750, some twenty years after Oudry started working on his drawings, the printmaker Gabriel Huquier brought out a first set of twelve prints under the title Livre d’animaux (Fig. 3; see Opperman, op. cit., 1982-1983, p. 158). Shortly afterwards, the Paris publisher Jean-Louis Regnard de Montenault acquired the series, completed in 1752 with a frontispiece which opens the first volume. However, the painterly quality of Oudry’s style made the drawings less suited to serve as direct models for the engravers, and Montenault commissioned Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger (1715-1790) to copy the compositions in a more linear style in graphite (for two examples in the collection of Jean Bonna, see N. Strasser, Dessins français du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, Geneva, 2016, no. 64, ill.; and for one at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (inv. 41139), see Couturier, op. cit., no. 39, ill.). Cochin, in association with more than forty other printmakers, produced the elegant engravings to which the edition brought out by Montenault still owes its reputation as one of the most magnificently illustrated books of the eighteenth century (Fig. 4). The first three volumes appeared speedily in 1755 and 1756, but the costs of the undertaking were so high that the fourth and final volume, of which the title page is dated 1759, was published probably only in 1760, thanks to a substantial grant from King Louis XV himself (Opperman, op. cit., 1977, II, p. 684).
The engravings generally reproduce the drawings’ compositions faithfully, although in some of them changes were introduced: a small number do not reverse the original composition, meaning Cochin must have reversed them in his drawing after them (nos. 5, 9, 19, 37, 63); and sometimes details were altered, as in drawing 88, or in the frontispiece (no. 1), where the bust admired by the hunchbacked Aesop and a grouping of animals appears in the drawing to represent Louis XV, whereas in the engraving he is recognizable as La Fontaine. What the prints fail to capture, however, is the spirited execution of Oudry’s originals: the agility of the brushwork, the effective use of darker accents, and the subtlety and playfulness of the white heightening.
It is ironic that the compositions, which played an important role in establishing Oudry’s reputation (Opperman, op. cit., 1977, II, pp. 157-158), were better known to his modern admirers from the prints than from the original drawings before the sale of the two albums in 1973, and even afterwards most drawings were not reproduced. The scholar and dealer Claus Virch, who bought both albums, dismembered the second one, containing drawings made between 1732 and 1734, and individual sheets from it found their way to numerous museums in Europe and in particular in North America (see, for instance, Te Rijdt, op. cit., nos. 20-21, ill.; and Grasselli, op. cit., no. 48, ill.), and to private collections such as Jeffrey Horvitz’s (Clark, op. cit., 2017, no. 13, ill., p. 621, nos. A.822, A.823, ill.; Clark, op. cit., 2022, no. 52, ill.); and they regularly appear on the market (recent examples sold Sotheby’s, New York, 31 January 2018, lot 6; Christie’s, New York, 30 October 2018, lot 256; and Sotheby’s, London, 29 July 2020, lots 225 and 226). Virch left intact the first album, with the drawings made between 1729 and 1731, sold it on to the British Rail Pension Fund, which in its turn offered the album for sale in 1996. Few have had an occasion to see it, and it had not been photographed in its entirety before the preparations of the present sale. A reproduction of all drawings in the first album is available on www.christies.com.
Those who take the time to leaf through the album – in person or virtually – are greatly rewarded. Oudry is a faithful illustrator of La Fontaine’s text, providing at least one drawing for each fable, in some cases two, and in one case even five. While in some instances, he found models for his compositions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illustrations of Aesop’s fables (Opperman, op. cit., 1977, II, p. 684), and while other sources can still be discovered, as a whole the series of drawings stands out for its inventiveness and freshness of inspiration. Oudry exploits his talent in depicting ‘as actors performing in established roles in the same way history painters were trained to compose their human actors’ (C. Giviskos in exhib. cat., Los Angeles, Houston, and Schwerin, op. cit., p. 88). But the poems also feature contemporary men and women, and Oudry stages them, both in interior and exterior scenes, like a skilled director. It is perhaps these exterior scenes, many of them in rural settings, that surprise the viewer most when given the opportunity to take in the riches of the album. They offer a unique panorama of the French countryside in the eighteenth century – sometimes realistic, sometimes less so, but always enchanting. They also enrich our understanding of Oudry’s gift as a landscapist in a different way than do the backgrounds in his paintings or tapestry designs, or than his famous drawn views of the park at Arcueil (X. Salmon et al., À l’ombre des frondaisons d’Arcueil. Dessiner un jardin du XVIIIe siècle, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2016, passim). Alongside a smaller number of scenes set in bourgeois houses or more modest farmer’s dwellings, they provide a poetic atmosphere for the amusing tales and moralizing messages of La Fontaine, of which the richness can only be fully appreciated when seeing a great number of drawings in succession. Only the album presented here still provides this possibility, securing its place in eighteenth-century French art as a graphic masterpiece inspired by a literary classic from the seventeenth century.
Figs. 1 and 2. The album’s eighteenth-century binding.
Fig. 3. Gabriel Huquier, after Jean-Baptiste Oudry, The Fox and the Stork. Etching. British Museum, London.
Fig. 4. Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers, 4 vols., Paris, 1755-1759 (or 1760). Copy sold at The Exceptional Sale 2022, Christie’s, Paris, 22 November 2022, lot 28.