DESPORTES
In landscape the healthy opposition to the prevailing classic style appears first in the work of the Flemish battle painter Van der Meulen, whose backgrounds, sketched on the spot, show a fine feeling for aerial perspective and atmospheric effects. But his example apparently attracted no followers. Though not, strictly speaking, a landscape painter, François Desportes (1661–1743), who owed less to his early training under Nicasius, a third-rate Fleming, than to his habit of using his own eyes and studying nature direct, treated landscape with similar freedom in the backgrounds to his portraits and pictures of the chase. In his paintings of animals, dead or alive, limp bodies of hares and birds arranged as still-life with flowers and fruits, or in a very frenzy of movement in his hunting pieces, he endeavours to emulate Snyders, without quite rivalling the Flemish master. Of his twenty-five pictures at the Louvre, twenty-three (Nos. 225–248) belong to this genre, but not all of them are actually exhibited. The Portrait of a Huntsman (No. 224), and the Portrait of the Artist (No. 249) seated under a tree, holding a gun in his right, and caressing with his left hand a hound whose paw is resting on a pile of dead game, serve to prove that he knew how to manage portraiture with the same bold, frank spirit and summary breadth. He was particularly happy in rendering, without laboured detail, the varying textures of fur and plumage.
Desportes’s only successful rival as a painter of animals and hunting scenes was Jean Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755). How closely his style resembled that of the elder painter is to be seen from his Wolf Hunt (No. 667), the Dog watching Dead Game (No. 668), and one or two similar pieces at the Louvre. Oudry was first taught by his father, and subsequently by Largillière, who encouraged him in the painting of still-life, and directed his study particularly to the observation of tone values and of the interchange of colour that takes place between objects in close proximity to each other. In 1734, Oudry was appointed Director of the Beauvais Tapestry Works, which took a new lease of life under his able management. It was he who supplied the designs for the Fables of La Fontaine, which figure so frequently in the tapestries woven at that great establishment. Perhaps his most interesting picture at the Louvre is the large landscape The Farm (No. 670), signed and dated 1750, one of the earliest examples in French art of a rustic scene painted for its own sake, without any attempt at ennobling the landscape by forcing it into a formal arrangement.