Le Petit-Pont, après l’incendie de 1718

The Petit-Pont on the Seine, recorded after the fire of 1718 destroyed the houses along its sides: the piles of the ruined Maison du Croissant rise from the water, the façade of the Hôtel-Dieu runs along the far bank, and the towers of Notre-Dame close the view beyond the rubble-strewn bridge. Jean-Baptiste Oudry, still in his early thirties, had just begun to win notice as a painter of animals and of hunts, and here he turns the same exact eye on a Paris street after disaster. The painting is held in the Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris.