Music-making Animals ("Air")

Music-making Animals ("Air"), dated 1719 and at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, is the Air canvas from Oudry's four-elements series and presents a whimsical allegorical conceit: animals performing music as a representation of the element Air, which carries sound. Animal music-making was a genre with roots in medieval marginalia and Flemish decorative art — the world-upside-down imagery in which animals took on human roles — and Oudry's version is both a continuation of that tradition and a demonstration of his ability to observe animal forms in unusual postures. The Air allegory's musical conceit allowed the artist to combine animal painting with the instruments and cultural associations of music that were simultaneously associated with the refined leisure world of Rococo society.

Canvas with the unusual challenge of placing animals in human-scale postures — standing, holding instruments — while maintaining enough naturalistic accuracy to be read as recognizable species. The tension between observed animal anatomy and imposed human-like behavior requires careful management: too anatomically accurate and the posture reads as impossible, too fantastical and the animals lose their specific identity. Oudry navigates this through maintaining correct species proportions and coloring within fantastic compositional arrangements.