ALEXANDRE - GABRIEL DECAMPS
Paris 1803-1860 Fontainbleau
A hunting scene, with two men tracking and shooting birds, one with a mounted gun and their retrieving dogs below by a low wall and one further dog flushing birds in the field.
Oil on canvas
13 by 16 inches; 33 by 40.5 cms
Signed lower right ‘DECAMPS’, in a period gilt frame
Provenance:
Private collection, Paris, France
Judge and Mary Webster collection, Millersport, Ohio, USA
Private collection Ohio, USA, purchased from the above in 1989
The current picture illustrates Decamps joy of Shooting; the atmosphere of the painting is very jolly as the two men are obviously most enthused by their sport. The dogs below send out a sense of excitement as one commonly sees on a shoot. The dog flushing the birds in the middle ground to the right is alert and attentive while the dog in the foreground wants to see what is going on over the wall with his paws rested against the ledge and his head straining forwards and upwards.
Decamps was aFrench painter and was born in Paris in 1803. In his youth he travelled in the East, and reproduced Oriental life and scenery with a bold fidelity to nature that puzzled conventional critics. His powers, however, soon came to be recognized, and he was ranked along with Delacroix and Vernet as one of the leaders of the French school. At the Paris Exhibition of 1855 he received the grand or council medal. Most of his life was passed in the neighbourhood of Paris.
He was fond of animals, especially dogs, and indulged in all kinds of field sports. He died in 1860 in consequence of being thrown from a horse while hunting at Fontainebleau. Decamps' style was characteristically and intensely French. It was marked by vivid dramatic conception, bold and even rough brushstrokes, and startling contrasts of colour and of light and shade. His subjects embraced an unusually wide range. He availed himself of his travels in the East in dealing with scenes from Scripture history, which he was probably the first of European painters to represent with their true and natural local background. Of this class were his Joseph sold by his Brethren, Moses taken from the Nile’ and his scenes from the life of Samson, nine vigorous sketches in charcoal and white.
Perhaps the most impressive of his historical pictures is Defeat of the Cimbri, representing the conflict between a horde of barbarians and a disciplined army. Decamps produced a number of genre pictures, chiefly scenes from French and Algerian domestic life, the most marked feature of which is humour the same characteristic which attaches itself too many of his numerous animal paintings.
Decamps was especially fond of painting monkeys. His well-known painting; The Monkey Connoisseurs; satirizes the jury of the French Academy of Painting, which had rejected several of his earlier works on account of their divergence from any known standard.
The pictures and sketches of Decamps were first made familiar to the English public through the lithographs of Eugene Ie Rouit
