Study of a youth

This sheet relates to other compositions of a red-headed figure, sometimes male, sometimes female, and often sexually ambiguous. A closely related work, seemingly including the same costume, was sold in these Rooms 11 July 2013, lot 22. Another version, Head of a Young Man, is in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and is dated 1888. A. Symons refers to such works in his book: 'These faces are without sex: they have brooded among the ghosts of passion till they have become the ghosts of themselves: the energy of virtue or of sex has gone out of them, and they hang in space, dry, rattling, the husks of desire.' (From Toulouse-Lautrec to Rodin, London, 1929, p. 156).