Young Draughtsman

Vaillant was born in Lille in 1623, and was apprenticed to Erasmus Quellinus in Antwerp in 1637. In 1647, he joined the Middelburg painters’ guild, but left already in 1651 for Amsterdam. In 1658 and 1659, Vaillant worked in Heidelberg and Frankfurt, after which he entered employment with the Marquis of Grammont in Paris until 1663. Back in Amsterdam in 1664, the artist’s patrons included the stadtholder family in Leeuwarden. Vaillant is particularly well known as a portrait painter and draughtsman. He was also one of the earliest and most prominent mezzotint engravers. The theme of a pupil drawing a model became popular mainly through Jan Lievens (1607-1674), whom Vaillant met around 1640 during his stay in Antwerp.

The plaster cast of the head being drawn by the young draughtsman is the youngest son from the world-famous Hellenistic Laocoön Group, which in the seventeenth century, was an important classical model. The standing figure on the table is a version of the Antinous Belvedere statue being the ideal of male beauty and an excellent subject matter for a young artist. The female bust on the right of the table has not been identified, but it is undoubtedly also a copy or cast of a classical model.