The cat and the monkey (from La Fontaine)

Painted in 1739 and from the Schorr Collection, this La Fontaine fable scene illustrates the tale of the cat and the monkey, in which the monkey persuades the cat to use its paw to pull chestnuts from the fire—taking the chestnuts for itself and leaving the cat burned. The fable, which gave French the idiom tirer les marrons du feu, carries a warning about being used as a tool by the clever for their own gain. Oudry's 1739 date coincides with the period of his intensive work on La Fontaine illustrations, and the Schorr Collection—a significant private gathering of French eighteenth-century works—is an appropriate holding context for such a fable piece. The fire, chestnut pan, and the two animals' contrasting expressions gave Oudry specific visual elements to anchor the moral narrative in recognisable domestic scene-setting.

The firelit interior setting required Oudry to handle artificial light—warm, directional, casting strong shadows—which was technically distinct from his usual open-air animal scenes. The monkey's dextrous, quasi-human manipulation of the cat's paw and the cat's reluctant posture would have demanded careful figure composition to make the fable's action immediately legible.