Spaniel Pursuing Ducks

Painted in 1748 and now in the Wallace Collection, London, this work depicting a spaniel pursuing ducks enters one of the most distinguished holdings of French decorative art and painting in Britain. The Wallace Collection's Oudry holdings represent the sustained British aristocratic appetite for French Rococo animal painting, which paralleled British sporting art in its celebration of hunting dogs and quarry. The spaniel—a water-retrieving breed particularly suited to duck hunting in marsh and wetland environments—was among the most common subjects of Oudry's single-dog compositions. The dynamic of pursuit—dog entering water, ducks taking flight—provided Oudry with two forms of animal movement simultaneously: the dog's swimming advance and the explosive upward flight of disturbed waterfowl. At 1748, Oudry was in his late productive period, still at the height of his powers, and this work belongs among his assured late masterworks.

The composition required Oudry to paint water convincingly: the splash and disturbance of a swimming dog, wet feathers on waterbirds, and the transition between wetland and open air. His water surfaces were handled through broken horizontal strokes with lighter highlights to suggest movement, while the ducks in flight were caught at the moment of wing extension, requiring foreshortened wing anatomy.