A Young Rabbit and Partridge Hung by the Feet

Although he began his career as a portrait painter, Jean-Baptiste Oudry quickly became a specialist in still life and animal painting. The artist often represented animals in dramatic and unusual compositions, and was among the foremost painters of hunting scenes and dead game. This work is deceptively simple, from the last years of the artist's life when he was known for painting dead game on white or neutral backgrounds, highlighting their illusionism, harmonious colors, and carefully depicted textures.

This painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon, the important exhibition by members of France's Royal Academy, the year it was painted, along with a now-lost pendant showing a jay and oriole hung by the feet. A contemporary critic wrote of the painting,

[t]he partridge is so fluffy and so natural, that I would have liked to pluck out its feathers, to see whether the flesh was as soft as its covering. The rabbit is soft, the fur is marvelously done, and the total effect of the work is better than anything in its genre the Italian masters have made.

Oudry was a professor at the French Royal Academy and works such as this would have served, in part, as examples of illusionism for his students, as well as paintings that demonstrate the relative qualities of hue and value of color and their role in perception.

The AMAM also has two drawings by the artist that include animals: A Bear Seen from Behind from the 1720s from the Gerstenberg collection, and The Palace of Circe from about 1732, one of a series made for a set of Beauvais tapestries with subjects from the Metamorphoses of Ovid.