Jean-Baptiste OUDRY (Paris, 1686 - Beauvais,... - Lot 9 - Ader

Lot 9
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Estimation :
60000 - 80000 EUR
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Result : 110 080EUR
Jean-Baptiste OUDRY (Paris, 1686 - Beauvais,... - Lot 9 - Ader
Jean-Baptiste OUDRY (Paris, 1686 - Beauvais, 1755) Io changed into a cow; Hippomena and Atalanta Pair of original paintings The first one dated and signed in the lower left corner: "JB. Oudry / 1732". 47,2 x 69,2 cm and 47,5 x 69 cm (tension bands) Provenance: Sotheby's sale, Paris, June 23, 2021, no. 56. Our two sketches are to be compared with the cycle of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the only weaving of which by the Beauvais factory began in March 1734. Acquired by the Danish king Christian VI for his palace of Christiansborg in Copenhagen, this hanging was unfortunately destroyed in a fire on February 26, 1794. In addition to about twenty drawings, two other oil paintings similar to ours in format and workmanship are known: Circe's Palace (private collection) and Ocyrhoé changed into a mare (Poznan, Muzeum Narodowe). Our paintings are preparatory to the first and third pieces of the ensemble. In each of the paintings, Oudry enriches his composition with several metamorphoses. In Io changed into a cow we can see on the left, a wolf crowned at the gates of a rich palace in flames which evokes the king Lycaon thus transformed by Jupiter. The lyre hanging on the trunk of a tree under the peacock's tail refers to the myth of Apollo and Daphne. In the second sketch, Oudry illustrates the metamorphosis of Cyparissus, transformed into a cypress tree after wounding a deer. We know one of Oudry's first thoughts of Io changed into a cow thanks to a drawing from the old Lamponi-Leopardi collection (private collection). Although the heifer, the peacock, the attributes of Mercury and the wolf are all present, their arrangement is very different: Lycaon's palace on the right occupies a less important place and the foreground is dominated by a stream on which a swan is swimming. For the head of Hippomenes, the painter reuses a drawing heightened with pastel sketched from life in the Menagerie of Versailles (Schwerin, Staatliches), in preparation for the Lion and the Spider (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum). The painter seems to be gradually moving away from the picturesque genre and devoting himself to painting from life. Oudry's choice to represent only the final phase of the transformations upsets the usual codes of representation of the fable. But in doing so, he would remove, according to Pascal-François Bernard, "part of the unreal aspect, the sense of mystery of the fable, which lies precisely in the unstable balance between the divine and the natural. This nevertheless translates the link that the artist makes between history and animal painting.
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