Lot Essay
Alexis Loir, who was born in Paris in 1712, and died there in 1783, is better known as a painter and pastellist than as a sculptor, although he himself records that he was responsible for a marble bust of the painter Carle Vanloo and a statue of Marsyas for the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. As Ann Poulet has pointed out (oral communication), the same composition also occurs in an early painting by Goya, which is signed and dated 1771, and may have been painted for a competition organised by the Accademia in Parma (Gassier and Wilson, loc. cit.). The dating of the two works theoretically allows of the possibility that Loir copied Goya, but it seems much more likely that both compositions depend from an as yet unidentified common source, very probably a print.