This picture is the last in a series of self-portraits. The earlier ones show the artist in a variety of poses, the most notable being the Self-portrait with the artist’s son, Charles-Antoine Coypel in the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Besançon. The best known of the sequence is the one painted for the Medici Gallery of Self-portraits in the Uffizi, Florence.  The self-portrait here is a version of the one painted for the Académie in 1715. The artist is shown holding the folio of engravings of the medals of the King, of which the artist had made a series of drawings from 1691 onwards.

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