Watteau copied old masters throughout his career, particularly Rubens who had painted for Queen Marie de'Medici a cycle depicting the history of her life in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. The head on the left is that of the Queen in the twentieth picture of the series, La Reconciliation de la Reine et de son fils. The head of the man is one of the hunters blowing a horn in The Hunt of the Atalantis and Meleager, a picture now in the Kunst Historiches Museum in Vienna which Watteau must have known from a copy since the picture was already at the time in Austria.

The present sheet shows such a consistent technique in the handling of both heads that they must have been drawn at the same moment in the studio from rougher sketches made independently from each picture. Margaret Morgan Graselli compares the present drawing to a sheet of studies of the head of a boy in the Boyman-van Beuningen dating both to 1719.