This medal depiciting Alexander Pope is made by Jacques Antoine Dassier, in 1741.

Dassier (1715-1759) was a medallist and engraver. The eldest son of Jean [John] Dassier. He studied in Paris and Rome before working as assistant engraver at the Royal Mint in London from 1741 to 1745. He later worked at Geneva and from 1756 at the St Petersburg Mint. Besides many individually commissioned medals, in the 1740s he produced a series of famous Englishmen, including Sir Hans Sloane (bronze, 1744; see Hawkins, Franks and Grueber, ii, no. 234), and contributed to his father’s Roman series.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was one of the most important poets of the Enlightenment (an 18th century philosophical movement that believed in the power of human reason over tradition and authority). He wrote his first poems at the age of 12 and gained access to literary and political circles after the publication of 'An Essay on Criticism' (1711). In 1713 he, together with the writer and satirist Jonathan Swift, was one of the founders of the 'Scriblerus Club', a literary group formed to satirise 'all the false tastes'. His translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey made Pope financially independent and enabled him to move to Twickenham in 1719. He was a passionate landscape designer. He laid out his own famous garden of five acres and also advised, among others, his patron Baron Cobham on the layout of his grounds at Stowe, Buckinghamshire.