On his return from St. Thomas and Caracas in 1855 Pissarro briefly attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Here the emphasis was on formal drawings from life rather than on landscape painting. Several of the drawings from this period survive including other life studies of negresses.

Another notable study of a negress, which may indeed be the same model as here, is housed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (R. Bretell & C. Lloyd, A Catalogue of Drawings by Camille Pissarro, Oxford, 1980, no. 42, illustrated). Whilst the present drawing is more finished and perhaps a more comples composition than the Ashmolean study, both drawings share a careful attention to light and shade, strong modelling and a strength of line which had not previously been prevalent in Pissarro's work.

We are grateful to Joachim Pissarro and Christopher Lloyd for their help in researching this drawing.