A hyena attacked by two dogs

This drawing by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, France’s eighteenth-century animal painter par excellence, is the only surviving study for a painting exhibited at the Salons of 1739 and 1746 and sold in 1750 to the Duke of Mecklenburg in Schwerin, where it is still at the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, inv. G 866 (fig. 1; see Salmon, op. cit., no. 67, ill.; and Morton, op. cit., no. 3, ill.). The nervous penmanship and the fact that the artist ran out of space to the left, where he had to draw the hind leg of one of the dogs below the rest of the animal, offer proof that the sheet is a first sketch, rather than a ricordomade after the painting. Two other drawings related to the painting are preserved, both of them considered ricordi: one, executed in black and white chalk on blue paper, at the Louvre, which is dated 1743 (inv. 31495; see Salmon, op. cit., no. 68); the other, in the same technique but somewhat smaller, at the Courtauld Gallery, London (inv. D.1952.RW.2078; see G. Kennedy and A. Thackray,French Drawings, XVI-XVII Centuries, exhib. cat., London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, 1991, no. 38, ill.). More carefully executed, these two drawings were destined for the market as finished works of art.