Potocki, a Polish statesman active at the time of Napoleon, met David while he was in Rome translating Johann Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art into Polish, immersing himself in the same classical scholarship that was shaping David's own artistic education there^[1]. That shared context, a Polish nobleman steeped in German classical archaeology, a French painter absorbing the same lectures and ruins, sits behind the confident, classically informed portrait David went on to produce.

David shows Potocki on horseback in elaborate dress, his hat removed in a gesture of greeting as his white horse bows its head^[1]. At the lower left, a dog barks up at the horse, appearing almost to nip at one of its legs. One historian has suggested the detail may gesture toward a live debate of the period, whether the nobility's claim to superiority rested on blood alone or also on the mind, though the same historian cautions that David's portraits of this kind tend to offer more questions than settled answers^[1]. Nothing in the picture explains the dog definitively; it remains an open, unresolved detail rather than a fixed symbol.

David's route to Rome was not smooth. Originally apprenticed to the rococo painter François Boucher, a distant relative, he was reassigned to the neoclassical painter Joseph-Marie Vien once Boucher noticed his pupil's interest in the new classicism^[2]. David then competed for the Prix de Rome for three consecutive years without success, a repeated failure that left him with a lifelong grudge against the Academy; after his second loss in 1772 he went on a two-and-a-half-day hunger strike, and after his third he reportedly threatened suicide^[2]. He finally won the prize in 1774 with Erasistratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus's Disease, a subject set by the judges, and travelled to Italy the following year with Vien, who had just been appointed director of the French Academy in Rome^[2].