Female nude kneeling, seen from the back

A student of Carle Van Loo, Lagrenée left for Rome in 1750 after receiving the Grand Prize at the Académie a year earlier. After four years in the Eternal City, he began a career as a history painter. Few of his drawings have survived; among these is a set of academies. Some reached a wider public through engravings imitating his drawing technique. This drawing is also known through a print from a series of seventeen by Louis-Marin Bonnet, who in this case may have worked after a counterproof, since his engraving is in the same direction as the drawing. Two drawings reproduced in the same series are at the Louvre (inv. 27477, 27478), one of which is dated 1770.