Having entered the workshop of David in 1781, Wicar first traveled to Italy in 1784. He was a particularly gifted draughtsman and made a name for himself by his fine line drawings after paintings and sculptures in the collection of the grand duke of Tuscany, which were engraved and published in four volumes, entitled Galerie de Florence, from 1789. Around 1800 Wicar settled permanently in Rome where he enjoyed a successful career as a portraitist, having been asked, in 1804, to depict Pope Pius VII Ratifying the Concordat (Castel Gandolfo, Villa Pontificale). Yet even more than Wicar’s official portrait commissions, it is portrait drawings such as this, often of friends and associates, that reveal his considerable talent in this field. This sheet belongs to a group of portraits made in Rome around 1800, all executed in graphite, the artist’s preferred medium. The detailed description of the sitter’s physiognomy is as distinct as Wicar’s keen interest in psychological characterization. Comparable in style and character, though perhaps less subtle in execution, is a group of forty-five portrait drawings from a sketchbook preserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, made a few years earlier, during Wicar’s second stay in Italy from 1787-93. Two further sketchbooks of portraits, dating from Wicar’s years in Rome, display the more pronounced sensibility and emotion of this sheet.