The Adventure of the Chamber Pot, plate four from Scènes du Roman Comique
Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686-1755)
n.d.
- Medium
- Etching on ivory laid paper
- Classification
- Dimensions
- Image: 32.5 × 28.1 cm (12 13/16 × 11 1/8 in.); Sheet: 36.9 × 29.4 cm (14 9/16 × 11 5/8 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Jean-Baptiste Oudry turned his hand to comic genre in this etching, which illustrates a scene from Paul Scarron’s 1651 novel, Roman Comique. Scarron’s misanthropic and drunken character, La Rancune, accepts a merchant’s kind offer to share the inn’s last bed. Ungrateful, La Rancune repeatedly awakens his benefactor from sound sleep, demanding the chamber pot, without relieving himself. Finally, after elbowing the merchant’s stomach and nearly strangling him, he asks again, fills the chamber pot to the brim and then empties it over the merchant’s head. By this malicious ruse he secures the entire bed for himself for the rest of the night.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
