The Wolf and the Lamb

The wolf and the lamb fable from La Fontaine is one of the most politically charged of the collection: a powerful predator invents spurious justifications to destroy a weaker party, making the story a commentary on the abuse of power that resonated throughout the hierarchical social world of eighteenth-century France. Jean-Baptiste Oudry returned to the La Fontaine fables repeatedly, and this undated work belongs within that sustained project of translating literary morality into visual form. The fable's directness—the lamb offers logical refutations that the wolf ignores, before simply eating it—made it difficult to render with the decorative lightness typical of Rococo imagery; Oudry's challenge was to maintain aesthetic beauty while conveying the fable's bleak message. The work's current location is unrecorded, reflecting how many of his fable paintings circulated in private collections throughout their histories.

The physical contrast between wolf and lamb—predator and prey, large and small, rough and soft—gave Oudry two very different textural problems to resolve within a single scene. The lamb's fine, dense wool required a stippled or closely hatched handling quite unlike the coarser, longer fur of the wolf. He typically arranged fable confrontations to give equal compositional weight to both animals despite their size difference.