Clara the rhinoceros in Paris in 1749

Clara the Rhinoceros in Paris in 1749, dated 1749 and held at the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, is one of the most remarkable animal portraits of the eighteenth century. Clara was a female Indian rhinoceros who arrived in Europe in 1741 and spent seventeen years traveling from city to city, becoming one of the century's greatest public spectacles. She was exhibited in Paris in 1749, drawing enormous crowds, and Oudry — as the preeminent animal painter in France and a natural choice for documenting extraordinary fauna — was commissioned to record her appearance. The resulting portrait is a document of genuine scientific and cultural significance: rhinoceroses were almost unknown in Europe and Clara's anatomy fascinated naturalists. The Schwerin museum, with its exceptional eighteenth-century French court art collection assembled by the Dukes of Mecklenburg, holds this as a key document of its era.

Canvas at a format large enough to document the rhinoceros's scale accurately. Oudry's approach is scientifically observational: the hide's wrinkled texture, the horn's form, the animal's proportions are rendered with the precision of a naturalist illustration elevated to the scale and quality of fine art. The surrounding environment is subordinated to the animal, which fills the canvas as a subject worthy of sustained attention in its own right.