Pierre Paul Prud'hon (Cluny 1758-1823 Paris)

This drawing was engraved circa 1800 by the artist's son Jean and published in a suite of expressive heads. It derives from one of the muses in the Triomphe de Bonaparte or La Paix, a large drawing exhibited at the Salon of 1801 and now in the Musée Condé, Chantilly (Prud'hon ou le rêve du bonheur, exh. cat. Paris, Grand Palais and elsewhere, 1997-8, p. 171, fig. 117a).
The drawing had a pendant, a Head of Innocence, of identical dimensions and also engraved by Jean Prud'hon, with which it shared the same history until 1981, and is now in the collection of Karen B. Cohen (Romanticism & and the School of Nature. Nineteenth-Century Drawings and Paintings from the Karen B. Cohen Collection, exh. cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-1, no. 1).