The French sculptor Jean-Louis Lemoyne, who lived from 1666 to 1755, was best known for his ability to merge the arts of portraiture and sculpture, created three-dimensional depictions of real individuals as well as works that depicted mythical or idealized forms. His 1724 "A Companion of Diana" (carved in marble and measuring approximately 72 by 30 by 23 inches), was commissioned by Louis XIV for the king's estate at Marly. The work was part of a group - created by a collection of artists -- of the nymphs who attend the goddess Diana, protectress of the hunt. Marly was a hunting lodge.
However, because Lemoyne did not finish the fluidly limned and rococo work before Louis's death in 1715, the work never took the place for which it was originally designed. When Lemoyne did finish the work (which is considered by many critics to be his finest piece), it was placed in the garden of Louis XIV's Chateau de la Muette.
The work, with its curving lines, its sense of movement swirling around a central core, and its sense of the sensual and the erotic (as the hound licks her leg as a lover might) all mark the work as belonging to the rococo school, which was just - in the first decades of the eighteenth century - beginning to establish its hold on the French court.
LeMoyne, Lean-Louis, National Gallery of Art website, http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/ggsculpt/ggsculpt-1275.0.html
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