Portrait of Pierre Antoine de Boyer du Suquet

As the well-educated son of Charles-Nicolas Cochin I, engraver and academician at the Académie Royale, Cochin II enjoyed official favor and advanced quickly. He worked, beginning in 1737, as draftsman for the Menus Plaisirs, recording celebrations and major events of the court in large scale, exquisitely detailed drawings and prints.
Inspired, perhaps, by the antique cameos he had seen in Italy, Cochin created several hundred small scale portrait drawings that span his career and constitute a major part of his legacy. Typically profile views drawn in black chalk, these medallion portraits may have grown out of an antiquarian interest, but were nonetheless stylistically avant garde, and would eventually fuel the taste for profile portraits as an aspect of Neoclassical style.
Perrin Stein, March 2015