Dogs playing with birds in a park

This delightful double portrait of a placid pug and a playful terrier that chases two birds on the grounds of a great château seems to be entirely unknown and unrecorded. It is fully signed and dated 1754, but the identity of the dogs' owner, who no doubt commissioned the picture, is untraced. It cannot be the painting recorded as 'Un tableau réprésentant des doguins et les oiseaux' by Oudry which belonged to the Comtesse de Verrue, as that appeared in her sale in 1737; however, that was almost certainly a canine portrait of a similar sort. The present painting finds precedents for its composition in some of Oudry's portraits of the royal hunting dogs in garden landscapes, notably the noble Misse and Turlu (1725; Fontainebleau).