Hirschjagd

This 1725 stag hunt scene, now in the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon, illustrates how Oudry's reputation spread across European collecting centres well beyond France. The stag hunt—la chasse au cerf—was the most prestigious form of French royal hunting, depicted repeatedly in tapestry cycles and large-format paintings as emblems of aristocratic power and noble leisure. Oudry's 1725 date places this work in the period when he was consolidating his position as the leading French animal painter and beginning to receive the major royal commissions that would define his mature career. The German title Hirschjagd reflects the work's subsequent collecting history in German-speaking contexts before entering the Portuguese national collection. Large-format hunt scenes of this type drew on a tradition established by Flemish and French painters of the previous century, but Oudry invested them with a freshness of observation—particularly in the rendition of running dogs, rearing horses, and fleeing deer—that distinguished his work from formulaic repetitions.

Hunt scenes required Oudry to orchestrate multiple moving figures—horses, dogs, huntsmen, and quarry—across a panoramic format. He organised such compositions around a central axis of action, with subsidiary figures framing the main pursuit. His painting of horse and dog anatomy in movement shows the kind of sustained observational study that his contemporary critics admired.