A carved white marble figure representing Venus with the shell, after the model by Antoine Coysevox (1640-1720) 19th century

Antoine Coysevox (1640-1720) was the most able French sculptor of the later part of the reign of Louis XIV. By the 1670s he was making a superb series of portrait busts of members of the court, including those of Le Brun (1676; London, Wallace Coll.) and Colbert (Château de Lignières). There after his career was dominated by work for royal buildings, in particular Versailles, where he provided a bust of the King (1681) for the Escalier des Ambassadeurs and a dramatic stucco relief of The Triumph of Louis XIV (1681–1683) for the Salon de la Guerre, as well as many statues and vases for the park.
One of these statues was the "Nymphe à la coquille" which was commissioned in 1685 after an Antique example, formely in the Borghese Collection, which was in its turn a copy after the Hellenistic type of the knucklebones player. The statue remaind at Versailes from 1685 until 1878 after is was moved to The Louvre where it still remains.