Portrait of the sculptor Pierre Puget

The identity of the sitter of this portrait is confirmed by the resemblance with engravings such as that from 1732 by Edmé Jeaurat. As the letter of this print details, it is based on a work by the sculptor’s son François (1651-1707), now at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. 7345; M.-C. Gloton, Pierre et François Puget peintres baroques, Aix-en-Provence, 1985, p. 130, no. 8, ill. 117). The sculpture on which the artist rests his arm is the head of Puget’s masterpiece, representing the antique wrestler Milo of Croton, now also at the Louvre. The authorship of our drawing, which is unfinished, is evident in the sensitive rendering of the face and the drapery, and the painstakingly precise execution of these passages, characteristic of the majority of Rigaud’s preserved drawings.