LATE 19TH CENTURY, AFTER THE MODEL BY JEAN-BAPTISTE PIGALLE

Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714-1785) was the seventh child of a carpenter in the employ of Louis XIV. He was apprenticed to both Robert le Lorrain and Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne before studying in Rome between 1736 and 1740. The present model is after the original terracotta of Mercury Attaching his Talaria of 1740, now in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The French Academy requested a version of the figure in marble, completed in 1741-42, now in the Louvre, Paris. It is upon this that the present plaster model is based.