Born into the peasant class, Louis-Jacques Thénard (1777–1857) worked as a servant to finance his education before becoming one of France’s foremost chemists. He was famous for discovering hydrogen peroxide and boron, and for inventing the pigment cobalt blue, also known as "Thénard’s Blue," one of the earliest synthetic pigments.

The sculptor David d’Angers believed in the now-debunked pseudoscience of phrenology, which posited that a person’s abilities and personality could be inferred from the shape of their skull. In this medal, he exaggerated the areas on Thénard’s brow associated in phrenology with keen scientific thinking and color perception, likely an allusion to Thénard’s work with pigments.