Jean-Baptiste Oudry

Louis XV of France loved the hunt above almost everything else, and in the 1720s and 30s he found the painter who could put that world on a wall. Jean-Baptiste Oudry had started out as a portraitist, but a picture of the king pursuing a stag in the forest of Saint-Germain, finished around 1730, made his name and won him the post of official painter of the royal hunts.

What set him apart was his patience with animals. He portrayed the king's favourite hounds one at a time, as individuals, and studied dead game, a hare or a pheasant, with a naturalist's eye for the weight of fur and feather. He even kept exotic creatures from the royal menagerie in front of him while he worked.

In 1734 he took charge of the Beauvais tapestry works and later oversaw the grander Gobelins factory in Paris, turning his own paintings into woven series. His designs for the fables of La Fontaine, the 17th-century poet whose animal tales every French child knew, were rewoven for decades. Oudry also cared how pictures were framed and lit, and lectured the royal Academy on it. He died at Beauvais in 1755, still feeding the looms the hunts and animals the century could not get enough of.