Master Art

While this fine drawing cannot be definitively related to any surviving painting by Jacques Dumont le Romain, it may be noted that the soldier’s helmet at the bottom of the sheet is similar to a feathered helmet, also depicted from underneath and on its side, in the foregound of the artist’s large painting of Mucius Scaevola before Porsena of 1747, today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon. 

Chantal Maudit has also pointed out that the way in which the head is drawn in the present sheet, and in particular the tufts of hair at the top and front of the head, is characteristic of Dumont, and is also seen for example in the head of Hercules in a large red chalk drawing in the Horvitz Collection in Boston.