The present drawing was part an album of 107 caricatures from the Arthur Kay collection inscribed with the title Tomo terzo de Caricature. The album, dispersed at Christie's in 1943, was bought by Kay in 1926 from John Grant, a bookseller from Edinburgh, who had purchased it from Langton House in Berwickshire, G. Knox, Tiepolo, a bicentenary Exhibition, Cambridge, 1970, no. 87. George Knox advanced the hypothesis that this album could be one of the eight succinctly mentioned in an inventory of Algarotti in 1840: 'otto grandi libri di cento e più pagine l'uno', two of which were described in a sale catalogue of 1854 as 'due grossi libri' with 'una copiosa collezione di disegni umoristici del Tiepolo', M. Levey, Two Footnotes to any Tiepolo monograph, The Burlington Magazine, 1962, CIV, p. 119.
The caricatures from the Kay album are dated by Knox to 1754-62.