Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger (Paris 1715-1790)

Aside from his designs for book illustrations, Cochin produced numerous small-scale portrait drawings throughout his career, starting at the end of the 1740s. Forty-six were exhibited at the Salon of 1753. Those which featured famous models – artists, writers and scholars, and officials of the Académie de Peinture – would often be engraved, while those of the artist's friends who have since lost identity (like the present example) were directly offered to the sitter (C. Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin et l’art des Lumières, Paris, 1993, pp. 617-626).
Portraits in which the gaze of the sitter is aimed towards the spectator are rare in Cochin's work, as he often drew his subject in profile. An identical trompe-l’œil frame can be seen in the Portrait de Marmontel engraved by the artist’s main collaborator Augustin de Saint-Aubin (ibid., fig. 13).