The precision of the drawing resembles that in Fuseli's drawings of his close friends the two sisters Martha and Magdelena Schweizer-Hess, S. 575-9, done in Zurich during Fuseli's six months there after his return from Rome in 1778. In so far as one can judge from the angle at which the head is drawn she resembles Martha rather than her sister. As Schiff writes in the catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Fuseli exhibition of 1975, 'Magdalena was married to the wealthy Johann Caspar Schweizer who, in his various guises as philanthropist, project planner, philosophical dreamer and spendthrift played a curious role in Parisian society before and after the Revolution. Magdalena was no less eccentric herself. She was a coquette, and of an irritable nervous constitution. She claimed she could divine earthquakes and underground springs, she could let herself go into an hypnotic trance by having her hair combed, she prophesied when in a feverish state etc. Martha was far more ethereal and tended to religious ecstasy. She died of consumption shortly after Fuseli's departure in December 1779' (p. 52 no. 4).

The two pencil drawings on the back, classical compositions with framing pencil lines, both seem to show a female figure lying on a bed, with , as well as other figures, a group of three figures acting in unison. The upper composition in particular suggests that Fuseli is planning a picture of The Dash of Brutus following the rape and suicide of Lucretia (cf. for instance the picture of the subject painted by Gavin Hamilton in 1763-4 (repr. Robert Rosenblu, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art, 1967, pl. 70)