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. In Meusel's Neue Miscellaneen, he compares Agasse and
Wouvermans, wholly in favour of the former. In that partial article much
is said of his extreme devotion to art, of his marvelous knowledge of
anatomy, of his special fondness for the English racehorses, and his
excellence in depicting them. He appears first in the Academy catalogues
in 1801 as the exhibitor of the 'Portrait of a Horse', and
continued to exhibit more or less until 1845, contradicting Nagler's
statement that he died "about" 1806. In the catalogues his name is given
as J.L. Agasse or Agassé. The number of times Agassé changed his
address confirms Redgrave's assertion that "he lived poor and died poor".
The writer of the panegyric already quoted says, however, that he did
not work for money, but that he was urged forward by the resistless
force of natural genius.