Dog Guarding Dead Game

Although accepted to the French Royal Academy at the highest level, as a history painter, Oudry made his career as an animal painter. Technically a lesser genre, it was also wildly popular among his patrons, who were often hunters. Oudry exhibited this painting and the nearby Ducks Resting in Sunshine at the Salon of 1753. He rendered each species’ fur and feathers exactingly, but the ruined wall and suspended trophies of the hunt impart a characteristic degree of artifice to the scene.