Panthers of Bacchus Eating Grapes

Alexandre-François Desportes was the leading French painter of animals, hunting subjects, and still lifes in the early eighteenth century. His Panthers of Bacchus Eating Grapes, from 1719, combines his animal expertise with mythological subject matter: the panthers (or leopards) who drew Bacchus's chariot were sacred to the god of wine, and their association with grapes was a natural pictorial conceit. Desportes had been trained in Flanders, where the tradition of animal painting and hunting still life reached back through Snyders and Fyt to the great workshops of Rubens, and he brought that Northern virtuosity to the French court.

Desportes renders the panthers with the anatomical accuracy of a painter who studied living animals in the royal menagerie. The grape clusters are painted with the jewel-like precision of Dutch still life, while the animals' spotted coats display his mastery of complex fur textures.