Alexandre-François Desportes

Alexandre-François Desportes (24 February 1661 — 20 April 1743) was a French painter and decorative designer who specialised in animals.

During a brief sojourn in Poland, 1695–96, he painted portraits of John III Sobieski and Polish aristocrats; after the king's death Desportes returned to Paris, convinced that he should specialise in animals and flowers.

His details of trophies of game or animals were used in cartoons for tapestry in which work of several painters was combined, woven at the Savonnerie and at the Gobelins (Portière de Diane, Louvre).

At his death, in Paris, he left a considerable amount of work in his studio (where his nephew Nicolas had trained), which included studies of animals and plants as well as some fox-hunting sketches by Jan Fyt.

In 1784, the comte d'Angiviller, general director of the Bâtiments du Roi acquired these resources for painter's models at the manufactory of Sèvres porcelain, so that Desportes' influence in the iconography of French arts extended almost throughout the century.