Étienne-Maurice Falconet (1716-1791) is among the highest rank of French Rococo sculptors, whose patron was Mme de Pompadour. Falconet attended l’Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1754. He was appointed as the director of sculpture at the  Manufacture Royale de Porcelaine at Sèvres, until he was invited to Russia by Catherine the Great in 1766. In 1788 he returned to Paris and became director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Many of Falconet’s religious works, commissioned for churches, were destroyed at the time of the French Revolution.