A young boy with long hair, bust-length

This portrait of a boy, probably one of Bernini's young assistants, is one of a group of sheets of similar size, in the same technique and on similar supports. These portraits are at Windsor Castle (two drawings), in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York and formerly with Luca Baroni at Colnaghi (A. Weston-Lewis, Effigies and Ecstasies, Roman Baroque Sculpture and Design in the Age of Bernini, exhib. cat., Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, 1998, nos. 12, 16, 17, and figs. 33 and 33). The touch of white on the pupil combined with the dark line around the lower part of the iris is distinctive of Bernini's technique, seen for example in the Portrait of a Man in Oxford (A. Weston-Lewis, op. cit., no. 16). The handling of the torso in the Oxford drawing can also be compared to the present sheet, as perhaps can the swooping shadow to the right and the rather odd hairstyle, cut short at the top and long at the sides.
The attribution of the present drawing was confirmed by Nicholas Turner on the basis of a photograph, while Ann Sutherland-Harris, also on the basis of a photograph, describes the drawing as a copy after a lost portrait by Bernini.