Lievremort-chasse

Hunting trophies — dead game arranged in the manner of a displayed kill — formed a recognised sub-genre within French still-life painting, and Chardin contributed to it with a series of works featuring hares, rabbits, and birds. 'Lièvremort-chasse' depicts a dead hare — a standard hunting trophy — arranged with the accessories of the chase. The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, which specialises in art relating to hunting and natural history, is a natural home for this work, holding a collection that includes both historical hunting equipment and paintings from the tradition Chardin was working within. In eighteenth-century France, hunting was a heavily regulated activity closely tied to aristocratic privilege, and images of game had social resonances beyond mere pictorial description — they implied access to domains of social life from which the bourgeoisie was legally excluded.

The hare's fur is rendered through a combination of warm base tones and cooler, lighter strokes that follow the lie of the animal's coat. The limp, dead posture is managed with anatomical attentiveness — the weight of the body is convincingly distributed along the hanging or resting form. Accessories of the hunt (bag, powder flask) provide contrasting textures of leather and metal.