This is an original engraving by I S Klauber. The original
painter was Joseph Duplessis. It has been museum mounted and
cleaned. The man in the painting is Gabriel Allegrain(1710-1795), a
famous sculptor.
Duplessis was a French painter who studied with Subleyras in Rome
1745-49. Returning to France he pursued a career as
portraitist in Paris, while retaining close links to his home town
of Carpentras. After 1774 Duplessis won favour at the court of
the new king, Louis XVI, and painted portraits of the entire royal
family, as well as of Gluck (1775, Vienna) and Benjamin Franklin
(1779). While in Paris, he dispatched altar paintings to the
cathedral of Carpentras, as well as decorative landscape paintings
to the local hospital. He retired to Carpentras from 1792 to
1796.