Drawn between 1914 and 1915, the present sheet is a relatively early work by the artist, and one of the very few surviving works from the period of the First World War. Valmier was associated with several Cubist artists in Paris in the years leading up to the war, and was particularly influenced by the work of Albert Gleizes. Valmier met Gleizes when both artists were conscripted to serve with an infantry regiment at Toul in Lorraine in 1914. There they met Major Lambert, a military doctor in the same regiment, who allowed both artists the freedom to continue working while serving in the army. Both Valmier and Gleizes used Dr. Lambert as a model for several paintings and drawings during the war years, most notably in Gleizes’ only major canvas of this period, the Portrait of an Army Doctor of 1914, now in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Lambert seems to have much preferred Valmier’s portrait of him to that of Gleizes, as the latter later noted in his unpublished Souvenirs, ‘The portrait that he [Valmier] made of the Doctor was excellent, a very good likeness that remained in the classical idiom. But for myself, I wanted to remain faithful to Cubism and not to play games with my own convictions. So the portrait I envisaged was a little surprising for the good doctor’s habits of mind. He did not conceal his way of thinking, but let me do what I wanted. I made of him, from memory, a large number of drawings…when he saw them, the model was pretty shaken…When [the painting] was finished…he refused, definitely but amicably, to take possession of it.’