Swan Attacked by a DogSwan Attacked by a Dog

Before the 17th century, animals in Western art appeared usually as secondary objects, a means of enhancing the principal theme of the work: horses, for example, would be necessary in a battle scene, a miniature cow might be needed to balance a landscape; a puppy could highlight the appeal of a child, a rearing steed lent an emperor his power. Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters, on the other hand, turned to the mundane and the familiar; just as they made flowers, food, barrooms, and bedrooms their principal subjects, so also they did the same for animals. Paulus Potter's monumental cows, for example, are familiar images (JAMA cover, July 19, 2000). The 18th century saw the focus of animal painting move to France, where the genre was dominated by two painters: Desportes during the first half of the century, and Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755) during the second half (JAMA cover, December 15, 1999). English painters, notably Edwin Landseer and George Stubbs, owned the 19th century, while the entire 20th century was expressed by a single work: the explosive Guernica, into which Picasso was able to compress all the horrors and violence of its wars.

Oudry was born in Paris during the reign of Louis XIV. His father Jacques was a painter and picture dealer and Jean-Baptiste probably received at least some of his early training from him. During his teens he also studied briefly with Michel Serre, a painter from Marseilles, but the defining aspects of his training came most certainly from the French portraitist Nicholas de Largillierre (JAMA cover, February 2, 2000) with whom, beginning at age 19, he spent some five years. De Largillierre, for his part, had been trained in the Low Countries and much of the fine draftsmanship, realism, and smooth brushwork that appear in Oudry's work can be said to have Dutch and Flemish ancestry, even if once removed. Early in his career, Oudry, like de Largillierre, was a portrait painter, but he failed to attract near the clientele of his master. On the other hand, he did attract the attention of the boy-king Louis XV: he was engaged to paint the royal dogs as well as scenes of the royal hunt, the king's passion and chief occupation. As an animalier, Oudry soon surpassed Desportes, who remains, even today, largely forgotten. By the middle of the century, Oudry was painting such dramatic works as Swan Attacked by a Dog (cover); whether it was his intention or not, he was able to freely disguise violent human behavior as that of irrational animals. There is evidence to suggest that these works were seen as aping human behavior.

Swan Attacked by a Dog is a dramatic scene, carefully staged to elicit maximum attention from the viewer while at the same time allowing the viewer to deny the horror. An ordered symmetry, a beauty of form and color, sanitizes the work: it is suitable for a Parisian sitting room or an aristocratic dining salon. The light and dark forms of the swan and the dog are locked in a broad S-shape that rises diagonally across the foreground, left to right, and is framed by the graceful bend of the leaves; the leaves are, in turn, a reverse echo of the archway of the building. Beyond such obvious features as the anatomic accuracy of the animals and their vivid expressions of fear, panic, and naked aggression, all of them highlighted by an a corresponding chiaroscuro, other, more subtle features should be noted. The finely detailed white-on-white wing feathers, for example, almost Whistlerian in their color, also echo the lines of the rib cage of the dog. Likewise the undulating white-crested ripples of a pond in the extreme foreground. Overall, entering from the left, is a bright, white light that unifies the disparate subjects. Reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch work, it especially reminds the viewer of the left-lighted interiors of Vermeer, as startling as that notion may seem.

Swan Attacked by a Dog is a large painting, almost six feet by seven feet, yet its original size was even greater. As with some of the other Oudry works, this one was probably painted to fill the architectural specifications of a particular wall. Often these works were horizontal overdoor paintings created to fill the space between the ceiling and the upper edge of the entryway, but in this case the work was probably designed for a vertical wall space. At one time the painting was twice the height of its current version and included a dead boar in the upper portion.

In addition to his hunting and game pictures, Oudry was a tapestry designer for the Gobelin works and later was made director of the Beauvais tapestry works. If he was indebted primarily to de Largillierre for his artistic training, he was even more indebted to his picture-dealer father for his business savvy. Overshadowed by the Gobelins, the only time the Beauvais works were profitable was during his tenure. Oudry lived a prosperous life and died in Beauvais in 1755. He was 69.