Between 1753 and 1763 the French painter Jean-Baptiste Descamps published his four-volume Lives of the Flemish, German and Dutch Painters, a compendium of artists’ biographies from Jan van Eyck onwards. The frontispiece features a personification of Painting, both working on a canvas of Minerva and writing (presumably biographies) in a volume; in the background is a Temple of the Arts with the portrait of Louis XV in the tympanum.

No. 141