Profile Head of a Youth

This drawing was once owned by the eighteenth-century English artist Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), whose collection of thousands of drawings was full of slight sketches and artistic 'first thoughts'. Reynolds' collector's stamp is on the back of the drawing as is the lot number (205) of the sales of his drawings collections in May 1794 and March 1798. The fact that his stamp is on the back of the drawing indicates that either he or his executors thought this was an inferior work. When William Roscoe sold it on 23 September 1816 he believed it to be by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and sold it along with another sketch attributed to Leonardo of 'Eleven heads' in profile (WAG 1995.273). According to a typed inscription attached to the mount, the English twentieth-century Parmigianino expert and former curator at the British Museum, A E Pogham (1889-1970), thought the drawing might be a copy by an unknown artist after a Parmigianino drawing, perhaps similar to a red chalk 'Profile of a Young Man' in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth.