Jacques-Laurent Agasse was an animal and landscape painter. He was born at Geneva, and received his first instruction in the public art school of that city. Whilst still under twenty he went to Paris, in order that there, in the veterinary school, he might make himself fully acquainted with the anatomy of the horse and other animals. He seems to have subsequently returned to Switzerland. The Tübinger Morgenblatt (1808, p. 876) says that "Agasse, the celebrated animal painter, now in England, owed his fortune to an accident. About eight years ago, he being then in Switzerland, a rich Englishman asked him to paint his favourite dog which had died. The Englishman was so pleased with his work that he took the painter to England with him." Nagler says that he was one of the most celebrated animal painters at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century.