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Popularized by the painters Jean Siméon Chardin, Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié and François-Hubert, the representation of the young drawing master developed particularly during the second half of the eighteenth Century. This article will account for the exceptional favouring of this motif, from its origins to its appropriation by an élite of men of letters, alert to the ideas of Rousseau and to the new taste for artistic practice. It is important to situate such iconography within the challenges posed by the century of Enlightenment whilst also trying to pin down the genre within a hierarchy that tended to die out. This motif went side by side with other representations of childhood and contemporary youth but it differs by the attention given to drawing and in this it reinforces its French specificity.