Pieter Boel

Pieter Boel grew up in Antwerp in the 1620s, in a city that had made animal painting its own. He learned the lavish Flemish still life of dead game and hunting spoils, the kind his likely teacher Frans Snyders had perfected, and was good enough at it to travel south to Genoa and Rome before settling back home.

The turn came when he moved to Paris around 1668 and went to work for the Gobelins, the royal tapestry manufactory. His task took him to the menagerie at Versailles, Louis XIV's private zoo of living exotic animals. Where earlier painters had worked from stuffed specimens, Boel sat before the living creatures and painted them from life, catching a heron shifting its weight or a lion at rest. In 1674 he was formally named ordinary painter to the king.

He died in Paris that same year. The studies stayed together: the Gobelins kept all 81 of his painted and drawn sheets, and many now hang in the Louvre. Later French animal painters learned from them directly, from Jean-Baptiste Oudry a generation on to the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, who studied Boel's animals for their anatomy.