The pianist, piano maker, and composer is shown in half-length in this handsome portrait, engraved by William Nutter after a painting by Thomas Hardy and published by John Bland in 1793. Bland had commissioned Hardy for several portraits of famous musicians, including this one of Pleyel (and what is now the best-known image of Haydn).

Pleyel likely sat for this portrait in London in 1791. He had traveled to England in search of work, performance jobs having become scarce in Revolutionary France, and assumed the directorship of the enormously lucrative "Professional Concert" series given at the Hanover Square Rooms. He made so much money, in fact, that upon his return to France in 1793, he aroused suspicion for the purchase of a large, moated château.

Ignaz Pleyel was hugely popular in his own time and is inexplicably overlooked today: he was one of Haydn's best students; he composed piano and chamber works that were, in some circles, even more popular than those of Haydn; he founded a publishing house that published over four thousand works by names as significant as Mozart, Beethoven, and Clementi; and he built pianos alongside his son, Camille, that Chopin would later consider the best in the world.

Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis summed up Pleyel's reputation and influence well: What composer ever created more of a craze than Pleyel? Who enjoyed a more universal reputation or a more absolute domination of the field of instrumental music?