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Befitting the novel’s emphasis on the aesthetic, her style here is painterly: As in Oudry’s composition, attention to detailed realism is everything.

Katharine Weber’s seventh book takes its title from a work by the French Rococo artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry.

Artists in the show include Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Norbert Grund, and the two men widely regarded as the genre’s founders, Antoine Watteau and François Boucher.

A carver, and probably painter, well known at this period in England, whose works are, however, no longer to be identified, was Nicholas of Modena, who made pictures, possibly small coloured statues, of Henry VIII. and Francis I. It is worth while to mention that one P. Oudry, apparently a Frenchman, was busily employed in this country about 1578, and painted various portraits of Mary, Queen of Scots, one of which is in the National Portrait Gallery, while others are at Cobham, Hardwick, Hatfield, and Welbeck.

Oudry’s designs are always adequate, and have more virility in them than is often found in the work of this school, and they are competently interpreted by a number of etchers and engravers, some of whom, it may be noted, worked together in pairs on the same plate, so that we find such signatures as “C. Cochin aqua forti, R. Gaillard c�lo sculpsit,” and “Grav� � l’eau forte par C. Cochin, termin� au burin par P. Chenu”—a very explicit statement of the method of work.