Portrait of Claude-Henri Watelet

The booklet of the Paris Salon of 1763 listed this portrait as number 131, but the picture never went on the wall. Greuze had not finished it, the head above all, because his sitter had gone to Italy. Claude-Henri Watelet travelled there in 1763 and 1764 with his companion Marguerite Le Comte, a painter he was teaching to etch, and the finished canvas was shown only at the Salon of 1765.

Watelet could afford the journey. He was a receiver general of finances, one of the officials who collected the king's taxes, and he spent his money on the arts. He painted and etched as an amateur, was elected to the Académie française on the strength of a long poem on the art of painting, and laid out a garden in the English manner, the Moulin Joli, on an island in the Seine near Paris. Greuze shows him at his desk with a pair of dividers, measuring a small bronze copy of the Medici Venus, the ancient statue then taken as the standard of female beauty.

The portrait does not appear in the sale of Watelet's collection after his death in 1786. The Louvre thinks he may have given it away in his lifetime, perhaps to Marguerite Le Comte.