The Fox and the Turkey Hens (1733): Art, History and Details

The Fox and the Turkey Hens (1733) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686–1755).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This drawing depicts a fable about turkeys whose anxieties about falling victim to a fox ultimately make them susceptible to the predator. It was one of 276 designs produced by Jean-Baptiste Oudry related to humorous but educational stories compiled by French poet Jean de La Fontaine in the later 1600s. Published in four luxurious volumes between 1755 and 1759, The Fables of La Fontaine withOudry’s illustrations was one of the most ambitious publishing projects of the artist’s time. The books were art objects meant to be collected more than read, but they were successful enough that they were reissued several times in later centuries.

Object facts

• Title: The Fox and the Turkey Hens
• Date: 1733
• Creator attribution: Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686–1755)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: brush and black ink and gray wash heightened with white gouache, blue ink in margin; framing lines in brown ink
• Dimensions: Image: 24 x 18.8 cm (9 7/16 x 7 3/8 in.); Sheet: 31 x 26 cm (12 3/16 x 10 1/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1977.93

A detail from the museum

The most recent edition of La Fontaine’s Fables illustrated by Oudry was a colored version produced in 2007 by Editions Diane de Selliers.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Webb, Sheila, and Cleveland Museum of Art. Paper, the Continuous Thread. Cleveland, OH: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1982.
• Montañés-Lleras, Susana. “Fairy Tales and Fables" The transformation of illustration in the long 19th century.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 64, no. 1 (2024): 10-11.
• Montañés-lleras, Susana. “Of Technology and Fantasy: fairy tales, fables, and the transformation of illustration in the long 19th century.” Gramarye : The Journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy 28 (Winter 2025): 51-65.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.