Desprez won the Grand Prix d'Architecture in 1776 after his sixth attempt. He travelled in southern Italy with the abbé de Saint-Non, drawing for the Voyage Pittoresque. In 1784, he met King Gustave III of Sweden, who asked him to come to Sweden for two years to work on the decorations of the opera. He stayed in Sweden the rest of his life, even after the assassination of the King in 1792 which halted his official career.
Desprez liked very macabre subjects. The best known work of this type is probably the engraving he made of a fantastic animal entitled La Chimère de Monsieur Desprez, which represents a three-headed winged quadruped in the shape of a skeleton gobbling up a corpse. Desprez also did a series of etchings of tombs where he displayed his most macabre taste, (R. Michel (ed.)), La Chimère de Monsieur Desprez, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1994, nos. 35-9, illustrated. The present drawing may have been intended to be engraved, as its technique is very close to an etching