Rococo Massacres: Hunting in Eighteenth-Century French Painting

Abstract

My dissertation is a study of paintings with hunting subjects made in France between the 1730s and 1750s, concomitantly with the escalation of Louis XV's (r. 1715- 1774) obsession with hunting. It concentrates on up-close depictions of dying and dead animals by prominent artists such as Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755), François Boucher (1703-1770), and Jean-François De Troy (1679-1752). Particular attention is paid to how the moments that surrounded the kill of the prey by royal hunters--the hallali and the curée--were conjured up by these painters, and how their canvases were integrated into interiors, particularly those dedicated to the king's after-hunt gatherings. These painted drops of blood, hanging tongues, dislocated bodies, and tortured carcasses complicate the lack of seriousness and alleged playfulness of the discursively and ideologically determined category of the Rococo.