Name: JEAN BAPTISTE OUDRY (Paris 1686-1755 Beauvais)
Brand: A hyena attacked by two dogs
Price: 13000.00 USD
Availability: SoldOut

JEAN BAPTISTE OUDRY (Paris 1686-1755 Beauvais)
A hyena attacked by two dogs
signed in ink ‘oudry’ (lower right)
graphite, pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white on buff paper
6¹⁄₄ x 8¹⁄₂ in. (16 x 21.5 cm)

H.N. Opperman, ‘Some Animal Drawings by Jean-Baptiste Oudry’, Master Drawings, IV, 1966, no. 4, p. 396, note 47, pl. 22.
H.N. Opperman, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, New York and London, 1977, p. 732, no. D593 (as Stag Hunt).
C. Schönfeld in Jean-Baptiste Oudry & Jean-Antoine Houdon. Vermächtnis der Aufklärung, exhib. cat., Schwerin, Staatliches Museum Schwerin, 2000, p. 128, under no. 53.
X. Salmon in Animaux d’Oudry. Collection des ducs de Mecklembourg-Schwerin, exhib. cat., Fontainebleau, Musée National du Château de Fontainebleau, and Versailles, Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, 2003-2004, p. 172, under no. 68.
M. Morton, Oudry’s Painted Menagerie. Portraits of Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Europe, exhib. cat., Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Houston, The Museum of Fine Art, Schwerin, Staatliches Museum Schwerin, 2007-2008, p. 128, under no. 3.

New York, M. Knoedler & Co.,The Artist and the Animal. A Loan Exhibition for the Benefit of the Animal Medical Center, 1968, no. 49 (catalogue by Claus Virch).
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eighteenth- Century French Drawings in New York Collections, 1999, no. 18 (entry by M. Tavener Homes).

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Lot Essay

This drawing by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, France’s eighteenth-century animal painter par excellence, is the only surviving study for a painting exhibited at the Salons of 1739 and 1746 and sold in 1750 to the Duke of Mecklenburg in Schwerin, where it is still at the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, inv. G 866 (fig. 1; see Salmon, op. cit., no. 67, ill.; and Morton, op. cit., no. 3, ill.). The nervous penmanship and the fact that the artist ran out of space to the left, where he had to draw the hind leg of one of the dogs below the rest of the animal, offer proof that the sheet is a first sketch, rather than a ricordomade after the painting. Two other drawings related to the painting are preserved, both of them considered ricordi: one, executed in black and white chalk on blue paper, at the Louvre, which is dated 1743 (inv. 31495; see Salmon, op. cit., no. 68); the other, in the same technique but somewhat smaller, at the Courtauld Gallery, London (inv. D.1952.RW.2078; see G. Kennedy and A. Thackray,French Drawings, XVI-XVII Centuries, exhib. cat., London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, 1991, no. 38, ill.). More carefully executed, these two drawings were destined for the market as finished works of art.