The Sick Stag

Jean-Baptiste Oudry · 1733

Medium

Brush and black and gray ink and gray wash, heightened with white gouache, on blue laid paper, with border in pen and black ink and brush and blue and gray wash

Original size

31.1 × 25.9 cm (12 1/4 × 10 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

"The Sick Stag" is a quietly melancholic work — a single ailing deer rendered with extraordinary sensitivity in ink and wash, the pale figure isolated against the cool tone of blue laid paper. Jean-Baptiste Oudry was the foremost animal painter in eighteenth-century France, appointed court painter to Louis XV and later director of both the Beauvais and Gobelins tapestry works. This 1733 drawing showcases his mastery of tonal range: working in black and gray ink with white gouache highlights, he conjures form, texture, and mood without a single drop of colour. The stag's vulnerability is palpable — not through sentimentality, but through the precision of Oudry's observation of living creatures. The composition draws on the Aesop fable of the same name, in which a stag's well-meaning visitors consume all his fodder, hastening his death — a moral Oudry's contemporaries would have recognised immediately. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates Oudry's delicate tonal draftsmanship into the richer, more tactile language of oil paint, preserving the stillness and restraint of the original while giving it a presence suited to display — a faithful tribute to one of the Enlightenment's most gifted observers of the natural world.