The Swedish painter Wertmuller studied and worked in France from 1772 until 1793, when he settled in America. The subject of this portrait, Jean-Jacques Caffieri, was a leading member of a large family of sculptors in eighteenth-century France. Caffieri stands beside a reduced version of his statue of the seventeenth-century dramatist Pierre Corneille, one from a series of the "Great Men of France." This painting was the piece required for Wertmuller's reception into the Royal Academy in Paris. It was shown at the Salon of 1785.