Still Life: A Dead Hare, A Dead Red-Legged Partridge and Two Dead Snipe

Hunting still lifes—known in France as trophées de chasse—were among the most commercially and critically successful genres of the Rococo period. Jean-Baptiste Oudry dominated this field in France as thoroughly as Jan Weenix had done in the Dutch Republic a generation earlier, and the 1750 date of this work places it in the artist's mature phase, when his technical control was at its height and his status as the foremost French animal painter was unquestioned. The combination of a hare and game birds—here a red-legged partridge and two snipe—was a conventional arrangement that signalled a successful day's sport in the fields and woodland, the pursuits that filled the leisure calendar of the French aristocracy. Worcester's acquisition of this work reflects the breadth of Rococo French painting's reach into North American collections during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when French Old Masters were avidly collected. The monochromatic fur of the hare against the richer-coloured plumage of the birds gave Oudry an opportunity to demonstrate his command of contrasting textures within a single composition.

Oudry achieved the matt, dense texture of fur by working with relatively dry paint and a stiff brush, dragging pigment across the raised texture of the canvas weave. Bird plumage required the opposite approach—thin glazes built up wet-on-wet to produce luminous colour. The tonal contrast between the pale hare and darker birds organises the composition across its surface.