Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Molière. This is an eighteenth-century engraving by the royal engraver Jacques-Firmin Beauvarlet based on a seventeenth-century portrait painted by Sébastien Bourdon. It was published by Jean-Baptiste Mailly in 1774 Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Estampes, N3, vol. 62. The depiction of Molière as a writer is a visual motif that appears only in post-humous portraits, yet had become standard by the mid-eighteenth century.

From A field of honor: writers, court culture and public theater in French literary life from Racine to the Revolution by Gregory S. Brown