Attributed to Jean Antoine Watteau

Camille Groult (1837-1908), Paris,
by descent to his son, Jean Groult (1868-1951),
and to his grandson Pierre Bordeaux-Groult (1916-2007), 
from whom purchased by the present owner in 1983

K.T. Parker & J. Mathey, Antoine Watteau, Catalogue complet de son oeuvre dessiné, 2 vols., Paris 1957, vol. I, p. 48, no. 345, reproduced, fig. 345;
F.R. Chapeley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1979, vol. I, pp. 528 and 530, note 3;
Watteau 1684-1721, exhib. cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art and elsewhere, 1984-1985, p. 214, under no. 132;
P. Rosenberg and L-A. Prat, Antoine Watteau 1684-1712, Catalogue raisonné des dessins, 3 vols., Milan 1996, vol. II, p. 692, under no. 418, reproduced fig. 418a;
M.M. Grasselli, 'Reviews:  Pierre Rosenberg and Louis Antoine Prat, 'Antoine Watteau 1684-1712, Catalogue raisonné des dessins', Master Drawings, vol. XXXIX, no. 3, 2001, p. 332, note 5 (as a counterproof of a copy after Watteau)

Hinged to mount at upper margin. Some light brown staining around the edges of the sheet. A more prominent brown stain in the lower right of the sheet located in the lower half of the woman's dress. Red chalk remains strong. Sold in a carved and gilded frame.
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In the original drawing to which this counterproof relates (the location of which is now unknown) Watteau has copied female heads from two different paintings by Paolo Veronese.  The upper head is taken from the Louvre Marriage at Cana, while the woman seen in profile at the bottom can be found in the artist's The Finding of Moses, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon. 

There are, however, clear differences of detail between the original drawing and the counterproof, which can be explained in one of two ways:  either Watteau continued to work on the original drawing after he made this counterproof, or the latter was actually made from a second version or copy, rather than from the original.   

Watteau could have seen Veronese's Finding of Moses in the French Royal Collection, but could not have known the original of the Louvre Marriage at Cana, which only came to France at the time of the Napoleonic confiscations.  His patron, Pierre Crozat, did, however, own a studio copy of the painting, which he displayed prominently in the front hall of his house on the rue de Richelieu, and this copy must have served as Watteau's source for the upper head seen here.¹

¹ M. Stuffmann, 'Les tableaux de la collection de Pierre Crozat,' Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6^è per., vol. LXXII, nos. 1194-96, 1968, pp. 43-44, 80