Jean-Baptiste Oudry
French, 1686–1755
BiographyJean-Baptiste Oudry was born in Paris on 17 March 1686. He studied with the painter Michel Serre in 1704, then beginning in about 1705/7 served a five-year apprenticeship with the portraitist Nicolas de Largillierre (1656-1746). Oudry was accepted into the Académie de Saint-Luc in 1708 and elected a professor there in 1717. In the same year (1717) he was accepted into the Académie Royale, where he qualified as a full member in 1719, was made adjunct professor in 1739, and full professor in 1743. Oudry served as head of the tapestry manufacture at Beauvais from 1734, and at Gobelins from 1748. He received many prestigious commissions for both easel paintings and decorative pieces from (among others) the King of Denmark, the Duke of Mecklenberg at Schwerin, and Louis XV of France. Oudry was an extraordinarily prolific painter, tapestry designer, and illustrator, and exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon between 1725 and 1753. With François Desportes (1661-1743), he was probably the foremost painter of hunting scenes and still lifes of dead game in France during the eighteenth century, but also painted portraits, pure landscapes, and genre and history paintings. Oudry painted little after suffering a stroke in 1754, and died at Beauvais in 1755. His son Jacques-Charles (1722/23-1778) was also a painter of hunting scenes and still lifes.