Death and its Spectators: L’Âme des Bêtes and the Noble Savage in Oudry’s Hunting Paintings
Written by Fiona Vail
Edited by Katherine Hudak
Je me représente l’âme des bêtes comme une substance immatérielle et intelligente : mais de quelle espèce ? Ce doit être, ce semble, un principe actif qui a des sensations, & qui n’a que cela.
-Claude Yvon, Âme des bêtes, 1778 (1)
Figure 1: Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Retour de chasse avec un chevreuil mort (oil on canvas, 1721; Staatliches Museum Schwerin).
The stage is set. An artificial setting forms the backdrop for the equally artificial positioning of natural bodies. Corpses are piled on top of one another, once-living forms twisting and folding in the throes of death, meticulously arranged as a florist might compose a bouquet. They are beautiful, mesmerizing, grimly fascinating. One still living actor, a large and graceful bird, reacts with shock and shrewd terror to the horrors around it. Such are the root compositions of two post-hunt paintings by the renowned nature painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry; Retour de chasse avec un chevreuil mort (fig. 1), painted in 1721, and Cygne se tournant vers une nature morte (fig.2 & 3), painted as a decorative piece for the Château de Condé en Brie around 1725.
The beauty of these two works cannot be overlooked. As viewers we are attracted to a spectacle which is at the same time delicate and morbid, drawing us in by playing upon our nostalgic connection to the perceived beauty of nature and our fascination with witnessing the traumas of others. The responses of the birds place them as spectators alongside us, pointing to a greater discursive movement towards the recognition of a nonhuman interiority during the 18th century, when the Cartesian concept of the bête machine was being widely rejected (2). These two images present a romantic and theatrical view of the nonhuman both in death and in the knowledge of death. In so doing, they are sympathetic to the animal soul and cater to a theriophilic public (from Ancient Greek “therion” – “wild beast”, and “philia” – “fondness”). This period of fashionable theriophily was part of a greater romanticizing of “nature” and all deemed close to it, which also contributed to the rise of the “Noble Savage:” a literary trope wherein Indigenous peoples were fictionalized as noble and innocent dying races. My goal here will be to argue that this theriophilic adoration of the nonhuman other is directly associated with the romantic adoration of the othered human through the “Noble Savage” trope, with which it occurs in tandem, and that these two forms of discursive idealization cannot exist without the enactment of real violence against these “others.”
Figure 2: Jean-Baptiste Oudry et atélier, [Cygne se tournant vers une nature morte [right] (oil on canvas, around 1725; Château de Condé en Brie)
The paintings of Jean-Baptiste Oudry and his atelier occupy an anomalous space in the art historical canon of the long 18th century. Originally trained as a history painter and portraitist, Oudry eventually left these “higher” artistic subjects to pursue the hunting and nature paintings for which he is now best remembered (3). While naturalistic hunting paintings were by no means uncommon, the vast majority of Oudry’s works are marked by a conspicuous presence and absence of human actors; the worlds occupied by these animals, even the identities of the animals themselves, are human-made. The human, on the other hand, is seen only through its material traces. The space occupied by the animal painting on the hierarchy of artistic subjects is an unusual one, as the work could be classified as a portrait, a genre painting, a still-life, or a landscape. In the case of these specific images, where the main space is divided between an animated reactive figure and one or many inanimate lifeless figures, one could consider their narrative compositions and affective power to better resemble that of the very history painting tradition that marked the start of Oudry’s career. It is almost certain that these compositions, had they contained human figures in place of nonhumans, would easily be classified as modern history paintings. This begs the following questions: what is the difference between the human and non-human subject? Who is subject enough to have a narrative, to be more than a “still-life” when painted dead? When does nonhuman subject become object–or, perhaps, were they always object? The space of the nonhuman subject/object in art and art history is not easily identified, and the confusion around it occurs synonymously with the confusion around the space of the nonhuman in thought and daily life. Indeed, our difficulty in pinpointing the nonhuman animal’s subjectivity and interiority, and what this means for the space they occupy in our lives, was as much a subject of intense academic thought in the long 18th century as it is today. This is often attributed to an increase in romantic sensitivity to a conceptual “nature” as a result of an increased physical separation from non-industrial spaces (4).
This act of questioning the nonhuman and our relationship with them has recently been reintroduced to the wider academic realm in a diverse interdisciplinary field (or set of fields, depending on whom you ask) variously called critical animal studies, anthrozoology, and animality studies, among others. In 1980, John Berger made leaps with his now famous “Why Look at Animals?”, an essay which explored both our fascination with the nonhuman other and our separation from them starting in the industrial revolution (5). His emphasis on visual culture and the human gaze lays down important groundwork for an art historical approach to animal studies. Despite this, much has yet to be explored in the nonhuman side of art history, particularly in the realms of nonhuman subjective experiences, different types of relationships with the other-than-human, and the concept of animality itself. Paintings such as these two, wherein all actors are nonhuman, can provide an introductory exploration.
Retour de chasse is a deceptively simple composition. A dead deer and a live blue heron hang from an old and knotted tree, some sort of hunting bag resting on a stone near them, while in the middle ground two falcons are perched calmly, hoods covering their eyes. The left side of the image, where the falcons sit, is backgrounded by a carved stone structure, perhaps the edge of a garden wall or a building. The background to the right side, where the tree and deer are found, is a natural landscape of blue sky and lush foliage. The heron occupies the space in the middle, caught between a solid world built by man and a more delicate world of nature conquered by man. The tree to which they are tied is notably cut in several spots, a testament to Enlightenment man’s ability to violently shape and manipulate nature to his needs. This human manipulation of the natural world is made even more elaborate in the nearly impossibly intricate arrangement of corpses in Cygne se tournant. The bodies are piled up in a way that seemingly defies logic to create a single complex mass wherein no form is valued individually, but rather for its part in the whole of the composition. Démoris notes the link between this common trope in Oudry’s hunting “still-lives” and Roger de Piles’ colouristic “tout-ensemble,” a painterly approach which values an overall effect based on the codependency of multiple fragmentary forms (6). A parallel can certainly be drawn here between this tout-ensemble approach to the several individual bodies from several species and the homogenization of all (non-human) animalia under the distinctly singular term “animal” (7). This connection is strengthened by the title of the work, which refers to this collection of bodies singularly as une nature morte.
If any one thing is clear in these two images, however, it is that these nonhuman characters are in possession of some form of interiority. Something is clearly missing in all of the killed animals, their bodies imbued with the sort of emptiness that accompanies death. In Retour de chasse, this emptiness is achieved by casting the deer’s face in shadows so that her eyes and mouth are rendered nearly invisible; in Cygne se tournant, it is achieved through gaped mouths and wide, unfocused eyes. Both paintings portray death with the vulnerable belly facing the viewer, appendages splayed out in wildly different directions, as if the energy that once controlled them and bound them together has been cut away. They resemble very much marionettes out of use, hanging on stage with no one to pull their strings. The swan and heron, on the other hand, have much more agency. Their subjectivity cannot be denied, as turned faces and outstretched wings highlight the horrors around them while the arching of their necks and open beaks add an almost sonic quality to their emotive responses. The result is that both birds act as witness, as a spectator to this spectacle of destruction. They also seem to both have distinct character expressed in the ways they hold their bodies and in the looseness with which Oudry renders their faces and feathers. Démoris deems this definitive of Oudry’s animal paintings, stating that “[c]ette psychologization de l’animal est sans doute un trait propre à Oudry” and remarking upon his focus on the “intéret expressif” of the animal (8). Both birds are expressive agents. A clear difference, however, is that while the swan is spectator to the death of others, the heron is spectator to their own inevitable demise. The heron is thus stripped of a key layer of agency: bodily control and the ability to flee.
Figure 4: Jean-Baptiste Oudry, L'air (dans la série des Allégories) (oil on canvas, 1718; private collection)
The role of spectator occupied by these two birds and Oudry’s care in expressively rendering their affective responses to their surroundings points to them as unique, feeling subjects. This ability to not only react to their surroundings, but to feel them, attributes to them the intelligence and soul argued for by Claude Yvon in his “Âme des bêtes”, written for Diderot’s Enclyclopédie. Yvon clearly contests Descartes’ model of the animal as body without soul, although his assertion of the presence of the animal soul is backed up by an affirmation that this is not a rational soul (9). Yvon’s animal is thus capable of feeling, but nothing more. Abstract thought, art, and any desire beyond those related to survival are thus reserved for humans alone, maintaining a distinct anthropocentrism even in accounts that are seemingly sympathetic to the nonhuman. This is pushed further by the use of the word “bêtes” rather than “animaux” in the title, a word which holds the powerful double meaning of both “animal” and “idiot”. Oudry’s birds might well fall into this category of the feeling-but-not-thinking nonhuman subject. It is possible, however, that the artist did not subscribe to this concept of the animal. In writing about L’Air (fig.4), one of his four Allégories, he noted the presence of “un singe qui veut jouer du violon” [emphasis mine] (10). This description of a nonhuman animal desiring to partake in an artistic endeavor, one which has no connection to their survival needs, could indicate in the artist a view of animals that attributes to them distinct characters, desires, or even thoughtfulness.
This interiority, however, is not equally applied to all of the creatures in Oudry’s works. The domesticated hunting animals in these two paintings are distinctly removed from the witness role that the birds occupy. This is applied both symbolically and physically with the erasure of their vision; the falcons of Retour de chasse are hooded so that they literally cannot see, while in Cygne se tournant the dog’s eyes are cast in shadows. Their individuality of experience is thus stripped from their pictorial representation, leaving them as mere reflections of the human presence that controls the scene. They become here the mirrors of their owners that Berger theorized while at the same time standing in for humanity itself, the creator of this violent destruction and dominator of natural lands (11). They also act as foils to the emotional birds. An angry dog, slightly hunched and cast in shadows, places its paw protectively on a dead fish and growls at a white, elegant and frightened swan; two falcons hunch over calmly beneath the twisting serpentine figure of a panicked heron. In the dog, the human presence is menacing and aggressive, the bringer of suffering; in the falcons, it is blindly calm, apathetic to suffering. Both are violent, and both images thus show a clear divide between the violent, careless man and the beautiful, helpless nature. This even carries into the bodies of the dead, where the slenderness of the deer and the pastel scales of the fish are carefully articulated. Here, one may sense a feeling of intense nostalgia for these beautiful once-living bodies. This nostalgia then transfers as well onto the still-living bodies of the heron and the swan, whose fates can be surmised.
Figure 5: Thomas Gainsborough, Girl with Pigs (oil on canvas, 1781-82; provate collection)
Figure 6: Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, Oil on Canvas, 183 cm × 244 cm, National Gallery, London.
Nostalgia for the not-yet-gone is a key element of 18th century romanticism. Theriophily, a branch of this romanticism characterized by the perception of nonhumans as superior to humans through their innocence, is often associated early on with the 16th century essayist and primitivist Michel de Montaigne, who wrote both of nonhuman animals and of Indigenous peoples in the Americas with particular attention to their purity and closeness to nature (12). Theriophilic values took root in popular thought and, by the 18th century “demonstrating some, even token, sensitivity to animal sentience became […] almost a requirement of politesse and respectability” (13). Romanticism in art and literature also grew significantly during this time, as did colonial pursuits with the Translatlantic Slave Trade. The result is that fashionable theriophily grew in tandem with other romantic views of an “other” deemed closer to nature, notably the popular literary trope of the “Noble Savage” (14). While both of these tropes reflected contemporary views on gender, as indeed white women were also deemed earthlier than men, a key difference is made here. The constructed purity of the white woman as reproducer was something to be protected; contrary to this, the constructed purity of the Indigenous person and of the nonhuman animal were both conceived rather as something to be mourned. In a time when human and nonhuman “others” were being increasingly used as products or labourers for a growing industrial world, their death (or at least the death of their innocence) became a requirement for societal advancement. For Indigenous peoples, this was exemplified by the self-fulfilling “Vanishing Indian” trope, which was given immense visual power with photo-colonial projects such as the works of Edward S. Curtis (15). For nonhumans, it was often romantic paintings. Thomas Gainsborough’s Girl with Pigs (fig.5), for example, demonstrates a nostalgic view of a bucolic life closer to the animal, while Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (fig.6) gives a dramatic rendition of the killing of a beautiful white dove in the name of scientific advancement. These nostalgic views of the still-living other rely on the impending or actively proceeding death of this other. Wright of Derby’s dove is beautiful because it is fanned out in its final gasping moments; Curtis’ photographs gained popularity because they were deemed images of “vanishing races”–a concept which, while creating a romantic pedestal, also succeeded in masking the genocide of Indigenous groups behind a conceptual inability of these cultures to survive. The romantic beauty is contingent on nostalgia; the nostalgia is contingent on the act of killing or of “naturally” disappearing.
Figure 7: Jean-Baptiste Oudry, La chasse au chevreuil (oil on canvas, 1725; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen)
This nostalgia is not lost in Oudry’s work. His heron is trapped, able only to await their fate. His swan is confronted by a menacing hunting dog. In his more active hunting paintings, such as La chasse au chevreuil (fig. 7), elegant deer are seen being torn down by hordes of aggressive dogs. Just as the “Noble Savage” trope could not have taken root without the violent displacement and genocide of Indigenous populations (indeed, it is hard to imagine a world where Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” could have been conceived, let alone written, without the precursory and ongoing project of colonial violence overseas), so too can the theriophilic love of animals not exist without doing so in tandem with the marginalization and brutalization of the “animal” (16). The nostalgic adoration of a conceptual “other” in both cases is contingent on the simultaneous violence against or abandonment of the real-world individuals who occupy this othered space. Worse than this, however, is that this adoration not only relies on violence but enables it.
Marginalization of any group does not occur in a vacuum. Oftentimes, the oppression of one group is directly linked to the discourse that is used to justify that of another. The Western category of “animal” as less-than-human has been variously used to harm human and nonhuman persons alike, specifically furthering a conceptual nature/culture divide which was used as the backbone of colonial exploits. When these same othered groups are placed on a romantic pedestal, however, they are reduced to an idealized concept rather than a group of complex individuals, and these real-world harms are thus compounded rather than challenged. Wolloch notes that the 18th century sensitivity towards nonhuman animals was, “ironically, a new type of human control of this world” (17). The love of the “other” as a function of their purity and innocence serves to infantilize them, which further harms this othered individual by rejecting their completeness. The theriophilic public seeing these paintings (the broader public at the Salon seeing Retour de chasse and the select public at the Chateau de Condé seeing Cygne se tournant) was likely sensitive to the subjectivities of the heron and the swan and to their beauty, however this does not necessarily mean that they would be in any way be sensitive to the interiorities of real nonhuman individuals or their rights. Theriophily itself then becomes another form of anthropocentrism by defining millions of species under a singular Western European lens of what is “good” and “pure”. The animals in Oudry’s hunting paintings are not animals: they are a representation of an abstract idea of animality itself. Good, natural, innocent. And when we look into the faces of that heron and that swan, we realize that the only feelings and interiorities that we are capable of projecting onto them are our own ideas of what the noble beast should be.
Endnotes
1. [Claude Yvon], “Âme des bêtes” in Encyclopédie, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (Neufchâtel: Société Typographique, 1778), 330.
2. Milam, Jennifer. “Rococo Representations of Interspecies Sensuality and the Pursuit of Volupté.” The Art Bulletin 97, no. 2 (2015): 192.
3. Freund, Amy. “Sexy Beasts: The Politics of Hunting Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century France.” Art History 42, no. 1 (2019): 46.
4. Nathaniel Wolloch, The Enlightenment’s Animals: Changing Conceptions of Animals in the Long Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018) 15-16.
5. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 1-28.
6. René Démoris, “Oudry: la violence sans histoire,” in Violences du rococo (Pessac, Presses Univ. de Bordeaux), 118-120.
7. This singular terminology was given notable critical analysis by Derrida at the 1997 Cerisy conference. See: Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2006).
8. René Démoris, “Oudry: la violence sans histoire,” in Violences du rococo (Pessac, Presses Univ. Bordeaux), 134.
9. [Claude Yvon], “Âme des bêtes” in Encyclopédie, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (Neufchâtel: Société Typographique, 1778), 327-330.
10. René Démoris, “Oudry: la violence sans histoire,” in Violences du rococo (Pessac, Presses Univ. Bordeaux), 129.
11. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 12-13.
12. Rod Preece, “Theophily Redivivus,” in Brute Souls, Happy Beasts, and Evolution: Historical Status of Animals (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 248.
13. Nathaniel Wolloch, The Enlightenment’s Animals: Changing Conceptions of Animals in the Long Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018) 15.
14. See: Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: a Curious Account of Native People in North America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
15. See: Sherry Farrell-Racette, “Returning Fire, Pointing the Canon: Aboriginal Photography as Resistance” in The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada, ed. Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) 70-90.
16. “Brutalization” here in the sense of exploitative material violence enacted against them as well as the discursive violence that relegates them to the category of “brutes”.
17. Nathaniel Wolloch, The Enlightenment’s Animals: Changing Conceptions of Animals in the Long Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018) 22.