Corneille Van Clève (1646-1732) was born into a family of Flemish goldsmiths living in Paris, and grew up among that network of prosperous sculptors, architects and painters surrounding the French court. He had a very successful career in the service of the Crown, and is known to have worked in a variety of media including bronze, which he often cast and gilded himself.
The present terracotta fragment is undoubtedly a model for a more finished work in either marble or bronze, although whether or not this work was ever executed is unknown. The attribution to Van Clève is based on stylistic similarities with several extant works, perhaps most notably the terracotta model for his marble morceau de réception of Polyphemus, now in Montpelier (Souchal, op.cit., pp. 369-370). Both works exhibit the same confident handling of the heavy musculature of the torso, which in turn betrays a knowledge of Italian sculpture which Van Clève would have seen as a young student in that country. Parallels for the figure of Victory are also to be found among Van Clève's oeuvre. His terracotta figure of Leda, and the lead figure of Amphitrite in the gardens of the Grand Trianon both provide convincing similarities in the treatment of the heavy eyelids, the drapery, and the graceful, somewhat mannered, limbs (Souchal, op.cit., pp. 378-379, 384-385).