Sketches of Redouté and Serangeli, by Louis-Léopold Boilly, 1798

Pierre-Joseph Redouté (10 July 1759, Saint-Hubert, Belgium – 19 June 1840, Paris), Belgian painter and botanist, perhaps the most important and celebrated painter of flowers of all time; he was nicknamed "The Raphael of flowers", and his botanical illustrations have been widely reproduced. Early in his career, he was appointed court artist to Marie Antoinette, but it was under the patronage of the Empress Joséphine, as her official artist, that he completed his greatest work and achieved his greatest fame.

Joseph Joachim Serangeli ( 1768, Rome - 12 January 1852, Turin), Italian artist who worked in the Neoclassical style, painting historical and mythological subjects and portraits. In 1790, he went to Paris and began his training at the Academy, three years later joining the studio of David. He opened his own studio in 1805, and completed several important commissions under the Empire. He divided his time between France and Italy, but two years after the fall of Napoléon, he returned permanently to Italy, where he eventually worked at the court of Savoy.

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Louis-Léopold Boilly (5 July 1761, La Bassée – 4 January 1845, Paris), French painter and draftsman. Also an adept portrait painter, he is best known for the prodigious number of genre paintings he produced which vividly document French middle-class social life of the times. His life and work spanned several of the most dramatic eras in French history, from the ancien régime, through the Revolution and the First Empire, and through to the rule of the second king of the Bourbon Restoration, Charles X.

These sketches were only two of many that Boilly made in preparing his group portrait of 1798, Réunion d'artistes dans l'atelier d'Isabey, which depicts many of the young artists then living in Paris, gathered together in the painter Isabey's studio.

The finished portraits of Redouté and Serangeli can be seen at far left and far right, respectively.