Arts etc

Right royal

David Wakefield

Jean-Baptiste Oudry is the subject of a 11:1.113erb exhibition in Paris at the Grand phi (until 3 January 1983). From this 6,1bitinn, organised with characteristic ilt'eh professionalism, Oudry emerges as kcirrInre than an 18th-century petit-maitre h)b.Purveyor of stags and hounds to the ki.khnY, as many people in this country rhir1 suppose. He was in fact one of the creative and versatile of French 18th- AloterY artists. Though Oudry is best u4dIl as official painter of the royal hunts Ticker Louis XV, he also painted beautifully and elaborate still-lives and some of the olt delicate and subtle landscape studies e Period; he was in addition one of the

inventive literary illustrators of all `. It

kythi as of course impossible to show

like Oudry's entire output, which

at least 1,000 paintings. Several in- 5:41lons with outstanding paintings by lion111,Were unable to lend. But the exhibi- fi°'fers enough to enable is to form a ktist' '13(11Plete picture of this underrated Wet Whose works are now dispersed all ikti et the world; many more still lurk illosqed in private collections. Not least Seng the exhibition's attractions is the 011ection of paintings from Schwerin liker Germany, shown here for the first eckil,11°Le they were bought by the Duke of ro i',,°_,unrg-Schwerin in the 18th century. 1,,wiitert,aiLifigie by contemporary accounts, his p t.ngs and the fine portrait of him irronneau, Oudry was a genial, astute thlifienlmhenselY hard-working man. He aaehs,t`le no-nonsense 18th-century ap- Nth '13 Painting, regarding it as a craft as tION 5 all art. Many of his panels, INtiallY the hunting scenes and still-life ltclintr, were designed as decoration for 8-rooms of châteaux belonging to too and royalty whose appetites were ;Int whetted by Oudry's huge slices of ktilsqln game arranged in geometric pat- 1k1168°4 the wall. He painted mostly during 0rence and 'the reign of Louis XV, for hulpleasure whose main occupations ;litho ilting, food and chasing women. kid ugh a t Fr s contemporary of Ch. ardin, ;11e.rn.art has none of Chardin's intense Ifiden concentration of vision and, reeled perhaps, he sometimes falls lti111.1n terms „, of sheer quality. Oudry's altl+o° is looser and freer than Chardin's heelugh considerably more accom- q awing the human figure — and Near es a far wider range of objects, Instruments, Turkey carpets, silver- ( ye d a whole variety of fruit, flowers ittongelables. These rich and elaborate 'Inons are admirably represented by

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the still-life dated 1744 from Detroit: a bed of tulips and a vase of flowers at the base of a wall. In paintings like this there is still a strong sense of formal hierarchy which the more 'modern' Chardin completely banished.

This same Ancien Regime flavour is para- mount in the hunting scenes which Oudry began around 1733, taking over from his older rival Francois Desportes as official painter of the Chasses Royales. Unfor- tunately the far more spontaneous sketches and cartoons for the Chasses are not on view, the majority preserved in the Musee Nissim de Camondo in Paris and at Fon- tainebleau (where they are fixed in the panelling). They can only be judged by a selection of Gobelin tapestries, woven from Oudry's designs. Intricate in detail and beautifully preserved, these scenes present a complete picture of royal sport in 18th- century France, which was evidently dif- ferent from the disorganised rumbustious style of hunting in England of the same period. In Oudry's scenes like the `Meet in the Forest of Compiegne' everything is enacted with formal courtly etiquette, more like a ballet or an opera than outdoor sport; the pecking order was obviously of supreme importance, and woe betide any follower who accidentally stepped out of line. Oudry was a born observer of animals and nature. Shortly before the great naturalist Buffon began to publish his Histoire Naturelle in 1749, Oudry explored a wide cross-section of the animal kingdom from the leopard and the lion, fierce predators like the vulture, the eagle and the buzzard to the gentle placid creatures, storks, herons and the antelope (as in the superb picture from the Beit collection showing three hounds straining after the in- nocent creature). Like La Fontaine, whose fables he so brilliantly illustrated in a series of drawings exhibited here, Oudry shows us

to retrain as an

`I'd like figure:'

establishment

nature red in tooth and claw, without sen- timentality. Perpetual combat is the norm in his view of the world where the law of the jungle prevails. The weak and stupid fall prey to the more powerful, as in the picture from Schwerin showing a buzzard attacking two ducks caught off-guard splashing about in a pond (and in the beautiful preparatory. drawing on blue paper). Sometimes, however, the two opponents seem equally matched, as in the painting from the Swedish Embassy in Paris, where an aggressive basset hound clipped rather like a poodle unwisely takes on a fierce- looking swan protecting its nest. At other times strength fails where superior cunning succeeds, in the magnificent 'Lion and the Gnat' (1732, Stockholm) from La Fon- taine's fable relating how the gnat which eluded the lion's mouth is finally ensnared in a spider's web: the moral is that of our enemies the smallest are most to be feared. Unlike La Fontaine, Oudry does not always draw explicit parallels between animals and men, but there is a strong suggestion that his animals represent a sort of microcosm of human behaviour. He was both moralist and naturalist in the best French 18th- century tradition. Oudry's activity as a landscape artist is perhaps the least familiar aspect of his work. The painting of the farmyard, `La Ferme' (1750), has been on view in the Louvre ever since 1848, but is often passed unnoticed as just another piece of rococo stage setting in the manner of Boucher. In fact, allowing for a certain artificiality in the foliage, 'La Ferme' is a remarkably exact example of natural observation, a panorama of 18th-century agriculture set against the background of a tranquil river valley in the Ile de France. The whole pain- ting suggests prosperity, order and good husbandry — far removed from la misere rurale which was all too often the case in 18th-century France, especially in the remoter provinces where the benefits of agricultural reform had failed to penetrate. Oudry's attitude to nature was usually that of the Parisian who enjoyed a good day out in the country walking or sketching, or an excursion to some nearby park like Arcueil on the Marne where he was often joined by .Boucher. It was at Arcueil, the property of the due de Guise abandoned then finally destroyed in 1752, that Oudry made some of his most beautiful landscape sketches, mostly in pencil and white chalk on blue paper. Though intended as studies in linear perspective, these views of trees, trellises and flights of steps are full of light and at- mosphere and evoke all the magic of a deserted park.

This is to mention only some of the aspects of this highly talented and prolific painter, whose work deserves greater recognition. For too long our general pic- ture of the 18th century has been distorted by dealers, collectors and art-historians, all of them ready to sacrifice artists like Oudry to their own preconceived view of the period, based on vested interest or spurious intellectual grounds. At last, it seems, it is becoming possible to look at 18th-century artists on their pictorial merits and to enjoy them on their own terms. Anyone visiting Paris in the next few weeks would do well to see this exhibition, as the opportunity is unlikely to be repeated.