Christophe Huet (Pontoise 1700 - Paris 1759)
‘Two Capuchin Monkeys
Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 56.5 cm
Signed and dated 1737.

Christophe Huet depicts a joyful, tender and intimate animal scene. Two capuchin monkeys are playing by a pond in a western-looking forest landscape. The right-hand background is animated by several buildings: a small church stands next to a large dovecote and is flanked by a sheepfold.

It is not unusual for Christophe Huet to see these exotic animals (parrots, American ducks, American and Asian monkeys) in local landscapes, while Western species (foxes, owls, deer) are depicted in exotic landscapes, surrounded by poppies, agaves and, for the architecture, representations of pagoda canvases.

In 1735, two years before our painting, Huet produced the famous and important series of ten large animal paintings for the Petit Luxembourg mansion in Paris, for Marie-Anne de Bourbon-Condé, known as Mademoiselle de Clermont (1697-1741). This series includes in particular ‘Paysage avec singes macaques...’ (Landscape with macaque monkeys), which is kept at the Musée Condé in Chantilly (Figure 1). Huet exhibited a number of animal paintings at the salons of the Académie des Peintres de Saint Luc in the 1750s, which led critics to describe him as ‘a worthy pupil of M. Oudry’. Christophe Huet thus followed in the footsteps of the great animal painters JB Oudry and JF Desportes, whose works he collected.