Alexandre-François Desportes

At the court of Louis XIV, most painters chased portraits and history scenes. Alexandre-François Desportes chased dogs. He had trained in Paris under Nicasius Bernaerts, a Flemish animal painter, and after a short spell in Poland painting aristocrats around 1695 he came home certain that his real subject was fur, feathers and the hunt.

The bet paid off. From 1702 Louis XIV had him paint the royal hunting hounds by name, each animal set in a landscape like a human sitter. Desportes rode out with the court carrying a small notebook, sketching the living deer and boar on the spot and the day's dead game afterward, so his studio pictures kept the look of things actually seen rather than arranged. He was among the first French painters to make oil studies directly from nature, out of doors.

He kept the work through two reigns, serving Louis XV as well, and his large still lifes often pile the game beside gleaming silver. Much of that royal silver was later melted down to pay for France's wars, so these canvases now stand as some of the only records of what it looked like.