Jean-Baptiste Oudry

Full of character and life, this dynamically drawn study of a stork is a fine and typical example of the drawings of birds and animals that form such a significant portion of Oudry’s drawn oeuvre. Firmly drawn in rich, black chalk, with deftly applied white chalk highlights, on the appealing blue paper that the artist so favored, the stork appears to be focusing its attention, as one might expect, on something below it, perhaps a fish. Yet although these studies are so lively and animated, Hal Opperman and others have convincingly concluded that they were in general drawn not from life, but from prototypes in the paintings or even tapestries of other artists, pointing out that there are never any of the pentimenti that one would expect in rapidly executed studies made from fast-moving animals, nor, in the end, is the handling of the chalk spontaneous or rapid enough to suggest these drawings were made from life.

A highly comparable sheet, depicting a heron, in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris, is described by Opperman as being after an oil sketch by Pieter Boel in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chambéry.¹

1. See H. Opperman, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, New York/London 1977, vol. 2, p. 822, no. D 947, fig. 324, reproduced