Still Life with Monkey, Fruits, and Flowers

Jean-Baptiste Oudry · 1724

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

141.6 × 144.8 cm (55 3/4 × 57 in.); Framed: 172.8 × 175.3 × 12.7 cm (68 × 69 × 5 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Few still lifes from eighteenth-century France hold as much visual tension as this one — a mischievous monkey poised among cascading fruits and blossoms, alive with movement in a genre that usually stands perfectly still. Jean-Baptiste Oudry was one of the most sought-after painters in Louis XV's France, appointed royal painter and later director of both the Beauvais and Gobelins tapestry workshops. His still lifes were celebrated less for their arrangement than for their uncanny illusionism — the way fur, skin, petal, and rind each seem to exist in a different material world, yet occupy the same canvas with complete conviction. The monkey, a fashionable motif in French decorative arts of the period, gives Oudry licence to introduce a living, unpredictable presence into a carefully controlled composition. The painting has been held by the Art Institute of Chicago, where its condition allows viewers to study Oudry's layered glazing and his disciplined control of light across varied surfaces. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on linen canvas using traditional pigments and layered glazes, preserving the warm tonal range and the textural contrasts — soft fur against waxy citrus skin, crisp petals against dark ground — that make the original so quietly arresting.