Featured on PDR in the collection Joseph Ducreux’s Self-Portraits (ca. 1790)

The painter Joseph Ducreux, born in Nancy, France, in 1735, was a minor aristocrat who began to paint during the final decades of the Ancien Régime. (In fact, he drew the last portrait of Louis XVI before the king was guillotined.) In 1789 or ’90, he emigrated to London with many other aristocrats, before returning to Paris in 1793. For the last ten years of his life, he continued his career with the assistance of Jacques-Louis David (a friend and younger painter in favor with the revolutionaries) and became the host of an informal salon for artists and musicians.