The leading Italian painter of eighteenth-century Rome, Batoni was especially admired by foreigners as a portraitist. The sitter of this picture has not been identified, but he may be French. He is shown with some of Batoni's favorite Grand Tour props: an ancient bas-relief of Antinous, a statue of Minerva, an armillary sphere, guidebooks to ancient and modern Rome, a volume of painters' biographies, and the second part of Homer's Odyssey. A half-length portrait of the same man by Batoni is in the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

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