Henri Camille, Chevalier de Beringhen

1722

Jean-Baptiste Oudry

Painter, French, 1686 - 1755

Sitting on a rock and shown from the lap up, an elegantly dressed, light-skinned man holds up a partridge by one leg and sits next to a dog, all against a landscape with trees and a stone manor house in this vertical portrait painting. On the far side of the rock, the man’s legs angle away from us to our right, but he turns his torso to look at us with brown eyes under dark brows. His nose has a bump near the bridge, and his full, pink lips are closed. His rounded cheeks are slightly flushed, and he has a bit of a double chin. His hair curls around his face from a widow’s peak on his forehead, and locks are tied back with a black silk bow. His white shirt is pleated vertically across the front below a high collar, which wraps around his neck. Lace lines the front of the shirt down the chest and the cuffs at the end of puffy sleeves. His camel-brown jacket is lined with topaz blue and edged with silvery lace down the front and at the unbuttoned cuffs. His brown pants are lost in shadow beyond the rock on which he sits. In his raised left hand, on our right, the partridge dangles from one red leg, its brown wings spread and its head hanging back. By the man’s right side and closer to us, the dog is white with a few black spots. It has large floppy ears and a short tail. It crouches on its hind legs, angled to our left, and braces itself on its front paws, looking up at the bird. A second dead bird lies on the rock under the dog’s poised body. A few tufts of plants and grasses grow out of the rock next to the dog’s front feet, and behind the dog and man is a fawn-brown sack and a cylindrical vessel with a spout, a powder horn. Two trees grow beyond the rock, up the left edge of the canvas. To our right, in the distance, two women talk near a low wall. One wears an aquamarine-blue dress and gestures with arm outstretched to our left, and the other, in pale pink, sits looking up at her companion. Beyond, trees line the drive up to the three-story manor house. The middle story is lined with notably tall windows, like a series of French doors. Steel-gray clouds against a few glimpses of turquoise-blue sky fill the top half of the painting above the house. The painting is signed and dated in the lower right corner: “peint par JB. Oudry 1722.”

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Oudry was the leading painter of still-life and hunting scenes in France during the first half of the eighteenth century. Much admired by Louis XV, he portrayed favorite royal hounds and painted scenes of the king riding to the hunt, which was the monarch's sporting passion. On occasion Oudry painted portraits; The Marquis de Beringhen, his masterpiece among them, most likely played a part in launching his artistic career at court.

Henri Camille de Beringhen (1693-1770) came from a family that had served the French crown since the sixteenth century. After a military career, he inherited the title Premier Ecuyer de la Petite Ecurie du Roi (Master of the King's Private Stables) in 1724, in which capacity he organized the royal hunt. He was a success at court, and was endowed with a number of lucrative and honorary titles. It was Beringhen who introduced Oudry to the young Louis XV, and the artist soon joined the royal hunts as an observer. Beringhen was a keen patron of contemporary artists, especially Nicolas Lancret, François Boucher, and Oudry, who provided decorations for his Paris town house and his country home at Ivry.

The Marquis de Beringhen is an elaborate image, in which Oudry combined portraiture, a still life with dead game, a living animal, and a landscape. The twenty-nine-year-old marquis, seated on a knoll at the base of a tree, is dressed in a linen shirt, a pale gray hunting coat lined with teal-blue velvet and trimmed with silver braid and buttons, breeches, and thigh-length boots. Strands of his powdered hair are caught at the back of his head in a black silk ribbon. In his left hand he holds aloft a red-legged partridge; with his right he pets a pointer. In the left corner is a still life of powder horn, fowling piece, game, and a game bag. In the distance two women converse on the terrace of a country house, which probably represents not an actual place, but a suitably gentlemanly setting that Oudry devised for Beringhen.

Oudry's art is characterized by sharp observation of nature, a bold sense of the decorative, and brilliantly assured technique. There are especially lively passages of painting in the costume, such as the handling of the lace of Beringhen's shirt and the silver embroidery on his coat, and in the feathers of the partridge and the fur of the hound. The Marquis de Beringhen epitomizes Oudry's approach to painting: the sophisticated elegance of the rococo style is combined with an acute sense of observation that is characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment.

(Text by Philip Conisbee, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 53


Artwork overview


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Acquired c. 1860 by Léonel-Rémi-François, marquis de Moustier [1817-1869]; his son, René, marquis de Mousiter [1850-1935]; his son, Léonel-Marie-Ghislain-Alfred, marquis de Moustier [1882-1945]; his son, Roland, marquis de Moustier [1909-2001], Château de Bournel, Rougemont; purchased 1993 through (Eric Turquin, Paris) by (Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York);[1] sold 7 March 1994 to NGA.
[1] Provenance provided by Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2000

  • Art for the Nation: Collecting for a New Century, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000-2001, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

2016

  • Fêtes & divertissements à la cour, Musée national des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, 2016-2017, no. 6, repro.

Bibliography

2004

  • Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 260, no. 211, color repro.

2005

  • Baillio, Joseph, et al. The Arts of France from François Ier to Napoléon Ier. A Centennial Celebration of Wildenstein's Presence in New York. Exh. cat. Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York, 2005: 54, fig. 28, 72, 169 (under no. 56); not in the exhibition.

2009

  • Conisbee, Philip, et al. French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2009: no. 76, 351-357, color repro.

2019

  • Freund, Amy. "Sexy Beasts: The Politics of Hunting Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century France." Art History (February 2019): 40-67, repro. 40 (detail), 45 pl. 4, 46 pl. 5 (detail), 47 pl. 6 (detail).

Inscriptions

lower right: peint par / JB. Oudry 1722

Wikidata ID

Q20177804


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