Meeting at the Carrefour du Puits du Roi, Compiègne forest, or Le Botté du Roi (The Booting of the King), ca. 1733
Signed in pen and black ink, at lower left, J B Oudry.
Purchased on the Edwin H. Herzog Fund with the special assistance of the International Music and Art Foundation
This drawing is an early design for one of the nine panels in the famous tapestry series Les Chasses royales de Louis XV, commissioned in 1733, a project on which Oudry worked for more than ten years. The final cartoon for Rendez-vous au carrefour du Puits du Roi, the first panel in the series, is now in Fontainebleau. There were two sets of tapestries made after Oudry's designs, one for the royal apartments at Compiègne (where they still hang), and one for the duke of Parma (now in the Pitti Palace, Florence).