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Pigalle revealed in this marvelously studied, unsentimentalized sculpture how brilliantly he could convey not only infant flesh but even infant character. An actual portrait of the one-year-old son of the court financier Paris de Montmartel, it appeared at the Salon of 1750, and its popularity was so great that it nearly eclipsed that of the Mercury. This was Pigalle's first essay in what was almost a new genre, or rather a return to the antique Roman type of statues of children. Pigalle's statue became in fact a pendant to an antique one presumably already owned by the financier, of a child holding a bird.
The statue's success led to its being duplicated and much copied, and Pigalle himself returned once or twice to the theme of children, now sitting, now standing, usually with fruit or a bird. They may be charming, but they seem separated from the first and most famous example by its pronounced, idiosyncratic portrait air. Pigalle seems to have recognized its worth by buying it back later for much more than he had been paid; it was in his studio at his death and was the most highly valued of all the sculpture he then possessed.
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