A vigorous sketch after the well-known bust of Caracalla in the Louvre, bristling with the energy of Cézanne's short, broken strokes. The shading, already extensively developed in broad pencil hatching, is reinforced by washes of blue-gray watercolor, presumably added in the studio. Other copies after this bust are on the verso of this page (see Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987-53-21b), in the Louvre sketchbook (Chappuis, Adrien.
The Drawings of Paul Cézanne. 2 vols. Greenwich, Conn., 1973, no. 1019), and in one at Basel (ibid., no. 1204), but none has the powerful sculptural form of the present drawing. Theodore Reff, from
Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 83.