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Jean-Baptiste Oudry
(French, 1686 — 1755)
A Dog on a Stand (1725)
Inventory Number: 2528
Oil on canvas.
40 x 50 inches (101.5 x 127 cm)
Jean-Baptiste Oudry is without doubt the most striking example of an artist who rose from the 'popular' artistic traditions of Paris to a place of distinction within the French Royal Academy. Oudry's exceptional technical mastery has never been in dispute, and he was also in the forefront of his times in the exploration of sentiment.
The 1720s were his most brilliant period. He discovered the animal as a subject for still-lifes and pictures of the hunt, themes he treated in a manner splendidly decorative in the best sense of the word. In the late 1720s Oudry began working for the King, painting the favourite royal dogs, and obtained the position of painter to the Royal Tapestry Manufactory at Beauvais.
Oudry was truly the official artist in the final phase of his career, from about 1740 on: administrator at the Gobelins as well as Beauvais; Professor in the Academy where he delivered two theoretical lectures late in his life; an assiduous (and esteemed) contributor to the Salons. He enjoyed an international clientele and reputation as one of the most versatile, fecund and inventive artists of eighteenth-century France.
Size can be commissioned smaller or larger.
Collection of the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.