Sexy Beasts: The Politics of Hunting Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century France

This essay explores the aesthetic and political potential of eighteenth-century French hunting portraiture through an analysis of Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Henri-Camille, chevalier de Beringhen (1722). The portrait’s eloquent deployment of human and animal bodies furthers both the artist’s and the sitter’s ambitions. Beringhen uses the portrait to formulate a version of elite masculinity that emphasized virility, personal sovereignty, and animal instincts, creating a model for political opposition to the absolute monarchy. Oudry uses the portrait to work out a visual idiom of striving bodies and sensual appeal that slyly suggests an equivalence between human and animal. This analysis of Oudry’s portrait of Beringhen, and the arts of the hunt from which it emerges, presents an alternative to the conventional narrative of eighteenth-century French aesthetics and political culture - one that is less playful, less gender-fluid, and less human. © Association for Art History 2019.