Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain, Sculptor

To become a full member of the Académie royale in Paris, a painter had to hand over a reception piece, a work the academicians judged before admitting him, and which then stayed in the Académie's own collection. Duplessis was received on 6 August 1774, and this is the picture he gave. His sitter was a fellow member, the sculptor Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain, then in his sixties.

Allegrain sits beside one of his own marbles, Diana surprised at her bath by the hunter Actaeon, and the statue itself is in the Louvre too. A painter's portrait of a sculptor with his work was a fitting thing to leave in a body that admitted both arts. The canvas was shown at the Salon the following year. The Revolution abolished the Académie in 1793, and its pictures were seized that December. This one went to the museum of the French school at Versailles, then to the foyer of the Paris Opéra, and reached the Louvre in November 1887.