The Pâté

The Pâté, dated 1743 and held at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, depicts a prepared meat pie — the pâté — as the central subject of a kitchen still life, representing the transition from hunting and raw game to the prepared, civilized pleasures of the table. The pâté en croûte was a prestigious dish in eighteenth-century French cuisine, associated with skilled cookery and refined entertaining, and its depiction in still life carried connotations of culinary sophistication alongside the more brutal associations of game. By 1743 Oudry was at the peak of his reputation and productivity, and The Pâté shows his ability to find fresh subject matter within his specialization by extending from raw game to the prepared dish. The San Francisco holding documents the global dispersal of important French Rococo works through nineteenth and twentieth-century collecting.

Canvas with the pâté's pastry crust providing a new surface type in Oudry's range — baked, golden, matte, with a complex surface topology of glaze and decoration. The pastry crust requires a warm yellow-brown palette and a brushwork that suggests the irregular surface of cooked dough without excessive smoothness. Any cut section would reveal the meat interior, requiring a transition from the golden exterior to the darker, richer interior tones.