 Both Louis XIV and Louis XV commissioned portraits of their favorite hunting dogs.Desportes would follow the royal hunt with a small notebook he carried to make on-site sketches for still lives of the game that resulted from the day's hunt, for the king to make a choice of which were to be worked up into finished paintings.In several paintings he combined game with a "buffet" of spectacular pieces of silver as they might be displayed in a dining room; these are precious documents of the lost silver of the reign of Louis XIV.