Hounds with Wild-Fowl and Game

Hounds with Wild-Fowl and Game, dated 1726 and at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, brings together in a single canvas two of Oudry's primary animal subject types: the hunting dog and the game bird. The combination of hounds with dead game was a well-established format that Oudry reinvigorated through his superior observation of specific breeds and species. The Danish royal collection, which forms the core of the Statens Museum for Kunst, assembled French art systematically during the eighteenth century when French culture was the prestige model for Northern European courts. The 1726 date marks a productive year for Oudry, when large-format hunting canvases were flowing from his studio as he consolidated his position as the preeminent animal painter in France.

Canvas with the multi-element composition combining living dogs and dead game in a spatial arrangement that suggests the immediate aftermath of a successful hunt. The dogs' living bodies — warm, tensile, alert — contrast tonally and texturally with the cooler, relaxed forms of the dead birds. Oudry uses this contrast deliberately: the tension between life and death, energy and stillness, is encoded in the technical differentiation between the two subject types.