The Origin of Sculpture

Paired with The Origin of Painting at the 1785 Salon, this companion piece depicts the mythological origin of sculpture — typically the story of a craftsman who gives solid form to a shadow or impression left by a loved one. Regnault's double treatment of the arts' origins was an ambitious philosophical programme: by visualising these foundation myths he aligned himself with the Enlightenment project of interrogating the nature and basis of artistic creation. The two works together invited Salon visitors to consider the relationship between the two arts — painting's silhouette traced against a wall, sculpture's figure rendered in three dimensions — as complementary revelations of the same fundamental human impulse to fix a human likeness against time and loss. At the Louvre, the two paintings form a matched pair that constitutes one of Regnault's most theoretically significant contributions to the history of art.

The composition parallels The Origin of Painting in its use of artificial or focused light to illuminate a central act of creation, but must represent the three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional arts. A figure working clay or stone in a directed light source allows Regnault to contrast the tactile and the visual.