Art History Speaker Series — Hunting, Ecology, and the Arts

Talk: Dogsbodies: Canine Portraiture and Hunting Culture in Eighteenth-Century France
Speaker: Amy Freund, associate professor and the Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History at Southern Methodist University
When: Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • 12:00–1:15 PM (Mountain Standard Time / MST)
Where: Zoom https://boisestate.zoom.us/j/92509387759

Photo detail from Jean-Baptiste Oudry, The Dachshund Pehr with Dead Game and a Rifle, 1740, National Museum, Stockholm

This event is free and open to the public

Series Description

Hunting has long occupied a central place in art history—not only in natural history illustrations, grand paintings of human–animal combat, popular prints, and other visual media, but also as the impetus for a wide range of material culture. It produced artifacts as varied as hunting horns, trophies, horse tack, taxidermy, furniture, and fashion. As both a subject of artistic representation and a material practice, hunting offers a compelling lens through which to consider how human intervention shaped attitudes toward the environment, constructed gender roles, and reinforced social hierarchies. Images of the hunt—often defined by direct and violent incursions into nature—came to embody humanity’s presumed dominion over the natural world. To examine these works critically is to gain insight into the historical entanglement of humans and their environment, and into the role of that relationship in shaping cultural and historical identities. Supported by Humanities and Social Studies Initiative (HSSI).

About the Speaker

Amy Freund is an associate professor and the Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History at Southern Methodist University. Freund is a specialist in 18th-century European art. Her first book, Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2014), examines how sitters and artists used portraiture to reformulate personal and political identity during the French Revolution. Articles related to this project have been published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Art Bulletin and in Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914 (Ashgate, 2010). Her second book, Noble Beasts: Hunters and Hunted in Eighteenth-Century French Art (Yale University Press, 2026), analyzes the representation of the hunt in late 17th- and 18th-century France. Research from this project has been published in Art History, Journal18, and several edited volumes. Freund is also the second vice president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and a past president of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA).