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The Blaffer Foundation Collection
French Paintings
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Jean-Baptiste Oudry
Allegory of Europe
1722
63¾ x 59¾ in. (162 x 152 cm.)
Oil on canvas
BF.1987.2
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Provenance: Cailleux collection, Paris; acquired in 1928 by Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, Ophir Hall, Purchase, New York; sale, Ophir Hall, American Art Association and Anderson Galleries, 14-18 May 1935, lot 1183, ill.; Ehrich-Newhouse collection; private collection, London. Acquired at sale, Sotheby´s, London, 8 July 1987, no. 85, ill.
Exhibited: Masterpieces of Baroque Painting from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1992, pl. 19; Five Hundred Years of French Art, San Antonio Museum of Art, 1995, fig. 22; Music´s Power: Great European Paintings on Musical Themes, Bartlesville, Price Tower Arts Center, 2002.
Literature: Jean Vergnet-Ruiz, Oudry, in Les peintres français du XVIIIe siècle, sous la direction de Louis Dimier (Paris and Brussels, 1930), p. 171, no. 277; Hal N. Opperman, Jean-Baptiste Oudry (New York and London, 1977), vol. 1, p. 527, no. P443, and vol. 2, p. 1013, fig. 82; J.-B. Oudry 1686-1755, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Grand-Palais, 1982, p. 87, fig. 33b.
The Allegory of Europe is part of a series of four paintings representing the various continents. Africa and America (signed and dated 1722) are currently at Versailles, Château; Asia (ca. 1722) belongs to the collection of E. Joseph Hudson, Jr., in Houston. In this series, Oudry used several motifs already employed for the four Allegories of the Elements, painted by the artist for his own pleasure between 1719 and 1721 and sold to the king of Sweden around 1740 (Stockholm, Royal Castle, on loan from the Nationalmuseum).
The Blaffer picture must be seen in relation to the Allegory of Air in Stockholm, where one can find the monkey holding a violin, the musical score, and several other decorative elements. The principal difference is that the column in the Swedish picture is replaced here by the bust of a woman (probably Minerva) whose helmet is crowned by a horse´s head—the horse is a traditional attribute of Europe. It is this bust that allows one to distinguish the subjects of the two works, but it would still be tempting to read the Blaffer picture as both an allegory of Europe and an allegory of the air; similarly, the Allegory of Asia would also be an allegory of water. Air is suggested by the bird on the right, but also (through the play on words—possible in both French and English—that connects the air that one breathes with a musical air) by the musical instruments (violin, bagpipe, flute, and guitar) and by the score, identifiable as Recueil d´airs sérieux et à boire (Collection of serious and drinking songs), published by J. B. Christophe Ballard in 1718. This same score can be found in several other paintings by Oudry, including Still Life with Musette and Violin (1725, Toledo Museum of Art; fig. 00). In the same way, the monkey holding a violin appears in numerous paintings currently dispersed in private collections.
Although a double allegory, the Blaffer picture is also a very beautiful still life. The academic prejudice that favored history painting and considered still life as an inferior genre has had a long life. This stimulated some painters, more at home in the second genre than in the first, to play with the often fluid frontiers between pictorial categories and to disguise their still lifes under the mask of allegory. This is exactly what Oudry does in this picture, where he also displays his virtuosity and his talents as a decorator. Extremely brilliant in execution, the picture is painted in a range of light and dazzling colors. Everything is done to give an impression of movement and vivacity: the presence of exotic animals and flowers, and especially the apparent disorder of the composition, in which the objects seem to have been arranged almost by chance, or to have been jumbled by the monkey. In fact, the composition is organized around the central vertical axis formed by the bust; on both sides of this axis, objects and animals respond to each other in a subtle play of echoes and asymmetries.
Oudry succeeds therefore in giving this still life a certain monumentality (accentuated by the painting´s imposing dimensions), while avoiding the danger of stasis. The artist brings a breath of life to his painting, which seduces the spectator from the very first glance.
The Sarah Campbell Foundation
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