1742
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
A Hare and a Leg of Lamb is a 1742 unspecified by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a dead hare and a raw leg of lamb on a plain ledge. Oudry painted this to show off how real fur and meat could look. Buyers in the 1700s wanted every hair and vein to feel touchable. The empty background pushes your eyes straight to the textures. If you like how light plays on surfaces, look up chiaroscuro.
Oudry used a starkly simple composition and sterile background to emphasize his virtuosity in depicting textures, a highly desirable skill of still-life painters at this time. These artists were aiming for the highest level of accuracy—an effect of the Enlightenment, the contemporary intellectual movement that emphasized scientific reasoning in all pursuits. These paintings were generally displayed in hunting lodges or dining rooms, as a glorification of the hunt and the bounty it brings.
This lavish display of game was painted one year after a devastating famine gripped France.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jean-Baptiste Oudry was a French Rococo painter, engraver, and tapestry designer. He is particularly well known for his naturalistic pictures of animals and his hunt pieces depicting game. His son, Jacques-Charles Oudry, was also a painter.
See the richer artist page
