To improve neglected skills, in 1759 the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture funded a yearly prize for the student's work that most convincingly conveyed a suitably lofty emotion as expressed on a model's countenance. Here, amid the casts of antique sculpture lining the classroom walls, Charles-Nicolas Cochin sets aside his own high rank in the Academy to join the drawing students around the posing platform to record the contest held in 1761. A telling draughtsman himself, Cochin seems less interested in the model's becalmed features (douceur, or gentleness, was the emotion assigned) than in catching unawares the students diligently absorbed in the task at hand, as well as his own bored colleagues who patiently monitor the three-hour session. The core of the Museum's collection of more than one thousand works by Cochin is an annotated portfolio of 69 drawings and 758 prints, including 525 rare proofs. Assembled in chronological order by a contemporary of Cochin, the portfolio is a unique document of the graphic oeuvre of this prominent figure in French art circles during the reign of Louis XV. John Ittmann, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 221.