Son of the art dealer and landscape painter Augustin Ménageot, François-Guillaume Ménageot traveled as a child to Paris, where his father was an adviser to the writer-philosopher Denis Diderot. The young Ménageot studied painting at the Académie Royale, first under Jean-Baptiste Deshays and then François Boucher. In 1766 Ménageot won the Prix de Rome for his painting Tomyris Plunging the Head of Cyrus into a Bowl of Blood (Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts) but spent three years at the École des Eleves Protégés before going to Rome, where he attended the Académie Française. He returned to Paris in 1774, and in 1777 was agréé (accepted) by the Académie Royale. That same year he exhibited at the Salon for the first time, winning praise for his painting The Leave-taking of Polyxena and Hecuba (lost). He was elected to membership the Académie Royale in 1780 with the submission of his large historical painting titled Learning Resisting the Passage of Time (Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts). The following year he received high acclaim for The Death of Leonardo da Vinci in the Arms of François I (Amboise, Musée de l’Hôtel de Ville), for which LACMA has the sketch. In 1787 he was appointed director of the Académie Française, in Rome, and following his resignation in 1792 he retired to Vicenza. In 1797 he was appointed professor of the academy in Florence; he returned to France in 1801 to become professor of the École Nationale de Peinture et Sculpture. Ménageot, who is credited with contributing to the development of Neoclassicism, received numerous commissions for paintings of religious and historical subjects. In addition to these large, historical works, he also painted small, slightly erotic mythological scenes.