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.