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Lot Essay
Henri-Camille, Marquis de Beringhen (1693-1770), was born into a storied French family that had served the crown since the sixteenth century. Following a successful military career, he inherited the title Premier Écuyer de la Petite Écurie du Roi (Master of the King’s Private Stables) in 1724, and in this capacity played an important role in organizing the elaborate royal hunts which had recently become a major preoccupation of the young King Louis XV. Beringhen was a major patron of the arts, championing the painters Nicolas Lancret, François Boucher and especially Jean-Baptiste Oudry, from whom he commissioned many paintings. Oudry’s 1722 portrait of the Marquis (fig. 1; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), for example, is an early masterpiece that helped launch the artist’s career at the French court. Indeed, it was Beringhen who introduced Oudry to the king in 1724 and secured a studio for the artist in the Tuileries palace, leading to numerous royal commissions.
The present work is one of six landscapes that Beringhen commissioned from Oudry, presumably in or just before 1727. They are all of similar scale, and remained in the Marquis’ collection throughout his life, ultimately selling in his estate sale in 1770. For this series, Oudry portrayed daily episodes of French country life executed in the genre pittoresque style for which he was celebrated in the 1720s. Grounded in the observation of nature, they are expressive, theatrical compositions that rely on the artist’s singular, inventive powers, often executed in a brilliant palette that takes advantage of contrasting passages of light and shade. As Hal Opperman noted (op. cit., 1983, p. 129), rather than accurate representations of real locations in the Parisian countryside, they were intended to be evocative of such scenery and were thus not the result of pure fantasy. In this way, they were something altogether new in French landscape painting, leading Opperman to concur with Jean Cailleux’s declaration that Oudry’s landscapes for Beringhen should be counted among ‘the very first “true” landscapes of the eighteenth century’ (ibid.).
The present work is one of six landscapes that Beringhen commissioned from Oudry, presumably in or just before 1727. They are all of similar scale, and remained in the Marquis’ collection throughout his life, ultimately selling in his estate sale in 1770. For this series, Oudry portrayed daily episodes of French country life executed in the genre pittoresque style for which he was celebrated in the 1720s. Grounded in the observation of nature, they are expressive, theatrical compositions that rely on the artist’s singular, inventive powers, often executed in a brilliant palette that takes advantage of contrasting passages of light and shade. As Hal Opperman noted (op. cit., 1983, p. 129), rather than accurate representations of real locations in the Parisian countryside, they were intended to be evocative of such scenery and were thus not the result of pure fantasy. In this way, they were something altogether new in French landscape painting, leading Opperman to concur with Jean Cailleux’s declaration that Oudry’s landscapes for Beringhen should be counted among ‘the very first “true” landscapes of the eighteenth century’ (ibid.).