Jacques-Charles Oudry (Paris 1720-Lausanne 1778)

Throughout the history of Western Art, dogs have enjoyed various forms of representation.  In portraiture, they were traditionally depicted as complements to their masters, sometimes as their protectors, as their hunting aides, as symbols of their wealth, or, in female portraiture, as a symbol of the sitter’s fidelity to her husband.  In mythological and religious painting, dogs were included as the companions to Diana, goddess of the hunt, Adonis, St. Roch, or St. Dominic (to name just a very few of their many incarnations). 

Beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coinciding with a new interest and appreciation of genre painting, artists began depicting dogs as the sole subject of the painting, a phenomenon of which the present picture is an excellent example.  Artists, like the Leiden fijnschilder Gerrit Dou; the French painters Jean-Baptiste Oudry, his son, Jacques-Charles Oudry, and Jean-Baptiste Marie Huet; and the English painters, George Stubbs and Philip Reinagle; were no doubt drawn to the canine subject as means to show off their skills at rendering detail and texture as well as their ability to endow these furry creatures with human-like expression.   

In this charming portrait of Linda, Jacques-Charles Oudry minimizes all other elements of the composition to give this little Pekingese center stage.  He paints Linda standing in a little clearing between tall grasses, one paw firmly on her biscuit, the other raised in mid-motion.  Her fluffy ears and feathered tail, playfully tilted head, open mouth, and her big, glistening eyes, all work to give the impression that Linda is a happy and pampered little creature. 

Jacques-Charles Oudry was the son of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, who was also his first teacher.  Jacques-Charles spent much of his career in Brussels, during which time he served as the court painter to Prince Charles de Lorrain.  As is evident in the present picture, Oudry the younger excelled in the genre of animal painting, and is best known for his work in this field.  Two of his pictures, Game, Dog, Flowers and Fruits, and English Pointer and Game, are in the Montpellier and Nancy Museums, respectively.