Presumed Portrait of Louis-François Prault, formerly called Inspiration

In 2012 a sheet of small sketches by Fragonard came up at auction in Paris, 18 thumbnail figures after his fantasy portraits, nearly all with a name written beneath. Under the one that matches this man, a figure caught pen in hand, the word is Pro. On that evidence the Louvre now presents him, cautiously, as Louis-François Prault, born in 1734, from a Paris dynasty of royal printers and himself a collector of Fragonard. For a long time the picture had simply been called Inspiration, because of what it shows. A man in a russet costume and a white ruff sits at a table with paper under his hand, pen lifted, and twists round to look up and away, as if a thought had just struck him. If the name is right, a man whose family lived by printing is posing as a writer at the instant the idea arrives. The canvas came to the Louvre in 1869 with the bequest of the Paris doctor Louis La Caze.