Henri Camille, Chevalier de Beringhen

Jean-Baptiste Oudry

National Gallery of Art

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.”