Study of Pigs

Three pigs stand and lie in the warm half-light of a farmyard, their pink hides and muddy snouts studied with an unsparing but affectionate eye. Alexandre Gabriel Decamps, the most celebrated French painter of animal and Oriental subjects in the 1830s and 1840s, made such studies directly from life — his pigs, dogs and horses were admired by Delacroix and the younger Romantics for their solid, unpretentious truth. This small oil on paper, mounted on canvas, was in the collection of the Chicago patron Henry Field by 1894. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.