Count Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy, Grand Master of the University

In 1846, the year Delaroche signed and dated this portrait, its sitter founded the French School at Athens, the institute that still sends French scholars to study and excavate in Greece. Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy was then Grand Master of the University, the title that went with the post of Minister of Public Instruction, which he held for the second time from 1845 until the revolution of 1848.

He ordered the portrait himself and paid 3,000 francs for it, and Delaroche shows him in his robes of office with the Legion of Honour. The picture stayed in the family for three generations. It went to his widow, then to their son Paul, and then to Paul's wife Eugénie, who left it to the Louvre in 1925. From 1960 it spent 15 years on deposit at the Cour de cassation, France's highest court, before returning to the museum.