Portrait of an old Lady, seated, half length, in a lilac dress with a black shawl, holding a cat

A preparatory drawing for the present picture, formerly in the Goncourt Collection, is now in the Arnoldi-Livie Collection in Munich. The Goncourt brothers attributed the drawing to Chardin because of an inscription on the reverse, but Elisabeth Launay, more recently in her monograph on the Goncourt Collection of drawings, suggests Ducreux as a possible artist (E. Launay, Les frères Goncourt, collectionneurs de dessins, Paris, 1985, p. 277, no. 73).