"The Duchesse de Choiseul as Diana"

Painted in 1704 and held by the Norton Simon Museum, this early mythological portrait by Jean-Baptiste Oudry—before his animal-painting career had fully crystallised—depicts a sitter identified as the Duchesse de Choiseul in the guise of Diana, goddess of the hunt. The mythological portrait, in which aristocratic sitters assumed divine or classical identities, was a convention deeply embedded in French and European court portraiture since the seventeenth century. Depicting a noblewoman as Diana—patroness of hunting, associated with chastity, the moon, and the forest—was among the most common of these transformations, and the choice resonates with Oudry's later specialisation in hunt imagery. The Norton Simon's holding situates this work in the context of an institution with strong European Old Master holdings. At this date Oudry was still training under Largillière, and the portrait shows his debt to that master's manner of handling fabrics, flesh, and aristocratic bearing.

The mythological portrait required Oudry to combine convincing portraiture with the iconographic attributes of Diana: crescent moon, hunting bow, quiver of arrows, and sometimes a deer or hound companion. His early technique, still shaped by Largillière's influence, relied on strong tonal contrasts and smooth, polished flesh surfaces, with more vigorous brushwork reserved for drapery and foliage.