Ducks Resting in Sunshine

Animal painting was a distinct and well-respected genre in eighteenth-century France, where hunting was a central activity in aristocratic life. Oudry, the century’s leading animal painter, exhibited this canvas and the nearby Dog Guarding Dead Game at the Salon of 1753. While not conceived as pendants, the two were hung together by Ange Laurent de La Live de Jully, an important collector in developing what was still considered a novel idea in eighteenth-century Paris: patronizing contemporary French painters.