[7][8] He evidently prepared an additional, complementary work for the Academy entitled Venus Presenting Arms to Aeneas.

Both paintings may have been composed in anticipation of that year's Prix de Rome competition, but apparently Restout only thought about entering the contest as he was not among the April finalists.

[9][10] Restout's career as a religious painter began in earnest in 1730, when he received a dual commission from the Benedictine abbey at Bourgueil near Chinon.

He, like his father, had a successful, though rather conventional, painting career: he won the Prix de Rome in 1758, was admitted to the Academy in 1769, and exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon.

His late baroque classicism rendered his altarpieces, such as the Death of St. Scholastica an isolated achievement that ran counter to his rococo contemporaries.