Portrait of Louis-Antoine dit Athanase Lavallée, Secretary of the National Museums from 1804 to 1816 (1768 - 1818)

Born and died in the shadow of the Louvre, Lavallée spent his entire career there. His father, the writer and traveler Louis-Joseph Lavallée, Marquis de Bois-Robert, was the author of the books Observations on the administration of the Musée central des arts and some texts from The Napoleon Museum Gallery with Armand Caraffe. A member of the Commission d'Instruction Publique, Lavallée was appointed commissioner in September 1794 to examine the condition of paintings sent from Belgium. In 1797, he became secretary to the Board of Directors of the Musée Central des Arts, along with artists Jollain, Hubert Robert, Suvée Pajou, Charles de Wailly, Léon Dufourny, Foubert and Le Brun.

Dominique-Vivant Denon was appointed Director General of National Museums by Napoleon, and in 1804, he made Lavallée Secretary General and Accounting Officer of the Louvre Museum. Denon's main collaborator, the latter owes much of his immense activity to Lavallée. In 1806, he presided over the shipment of Farnese antiques from Rome to Paris. In 1815, Napoleon entrusted him with the mission of securing the most precious objects that the Allies wanted to seize. Lavallée distinguished himself by his stubborn resistance to the repossession of works of art, to the point of repeatedly recovering paintings already loaded onto stretchers.

When he painted this portrait, Prud'hon had just exhibited his two masterpieces at the Salon, Justice and the Divine vengeance pursuing Crime and Psyche which earned him public recognition and the Légion d'honneur. It is likely that this intimate, smiling portrait is the Portrait of a man exhibited at the Salon of 1810, painted "with a broad, mellow brushstroke", this portrait is indeed typical of Prud'hon's style, distinguished within his generation by the poetry of his vaporous brushwork, which owes much to Leonardo and Correggio. It is one of the flagship works of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, acquired in 1880 from the model's granddaughter, thanks to a 2,000-franc bequest from an Orléans woman, Mlle Danger, to enrich the collections.