Antoine Vestier was a French miniaturist and painter of portraits, born at Avallon

Avallon

Avallon is a commune in the Yonne department in Burgundy in center-eastern France.-Geography:Avallon is located 50 km south-southeast of Auxerre, served by a branch of the Paris-Lyon railway and by exit 22 of the A6 motorway...

 in Burgundy, who trained in the atelier of Jean-Baptiste Pierre. He showed his work at the Salon de la Correspondance, Paris, before being admitted (agréé) to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture

Académie de peinture et de sculpture

The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture , Paris, was founded in 1648, modelled on Italian examples, such as the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. Paris already had the Académie de Saint-Luc, which was a city artist guild like any other Guild of Saint Luke...

 in 1785, when a portrait of the painter Gabriel François Doyen

Gabriel François Doyen

Gabriel François Doyen was a French painter, who was born at Paris.His passion for art prevailed over his father's wish, and he became in his twelfth year a pupil of Charles-André van Loo. Making rapid progress, he obtained at twenty the Grand Prix de Rome, and in 1748 set out for Rome...

, was his morceau de réception.

Among his sitters was the royal ébéniste

Ébéniste

Ébéniste is the French word for a cabinetmaker, whereas in French menuisier denotes a woodcarver or chairmaker. The English equivalent for "ébéniste," "ebonist," is never commonly used. Originally, an ébéniste was one who worked with ebony, a favoured luxury wood for mid-seventeenth century...

, Jean Henri Riesener

Jean Henri Riesener

Jean-Henri Riesener was the French royal ébéniste, working in Paris, whose work exemplified the early neoclassical Louis XVI style"....

 (1786, Musée de Versailles).

Further portraits include

• The Chevalier de Latude, 1789 (Paris, musée Carnavalet)
• Nicolas-Guy Brenet
  Nicolas-Guy Brenet
  Nicolas-Guy Brenet was a French history painter who studied in the atelier of François Boucher but abandoned his master's rococo manner in the 1760s, to paint in a conscious revival of the academic classicism of Nicolas Poussin...
  
  , painter, 1786 (Paris, musée du Louvre)
• Jean Thurel
  Jean Thurel
  Jean Thurel was a fusilier of the French Army with an extraordinarily long career that spanned over 90 years of service in the Touraine Regiment...
  
  , fusilier, 1788; this aged veteran wears three medals, witness to his seventy-two years of service (Tours, musée des Beaux-Arts)
• A Chevalier of Malta
  Knights Hospitaller
  The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta , also known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta , Order of Malta or Knights of Malta, is a Roman Catholic lay religious order, traditionally of military, chivalrous, noble nature. It is the world's...
  
  holding the portrait of the Bailli de Hautefeuille, commander of the Order, 1788 (Dijon, musée des beaux-arts).

Further reading

• Sueur, Jean-Claude. Le portraitiste Antoine Vestier (1740-1824), Rueil-Malmaison, 1974. (privately printed)
• Passez, Anne-Marie, with Joseph Baillio and Marie-Christine Maufus. Antoine Vestier, 1740-1824, (Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, Fondation Wildenstein) 1989.