This is one of three copies in the Philadelphia sketchbooks after a Quattrocento bust of the banker Filippo Strozzi, which entered the Louvre in 1878. The others are on page XXX recto in this sketchbook and page 23 verso in Sketchbook I (see Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987-53-60a, 1987-53-18b); a fourth copy is in the Basel museum (Chappuis, Adrien. The Drawings of Paul Cézanne. 2 vols. Greenwich, Conn., 1973, no. 560). Each is distinct in its vision and graphic style, and the distinctive quality of the present drawing is its dramatic intensity: viewed from a position unusually close and slightly below, the stern face looms up with an almost awesome power, which is reinforced by the heavily reworked contours and unmitigated by the minimal indication of modeling. Theodore Reff, from Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 190.