While Hesse was of German descent, he spent his entire career in France, where he trained with Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Baptiste Isabey, both artists skilled in portraiture. He made portraits his specialty, producing miniatures and lithographic portraits, which he began exhibiting at the Salon in 1808. This large, early portrait study is indebted to the format popularized by Isabey and executed in a similar method of black and white chalks on a medium-toned ground.
The sitter is not identified, although the drawing is dated 1804. While it has been suggested this might be a self-portrait of the twenty-three-year-old artist, there are no other portraits of Hesse for comparison. The sitter appears similar to that found in an often-copied painted portrait by Hesse, which depicts Etienne Jean-Francois d'Aligre (1770-1847) and is dated 1820. Could this sheet depict the thirty-four-year-old, who in 1803 was appointed by Napoleon as the Conseiller general de la Seine? The resemblance to the fifty-year-old sitter in the 1820 painting is compelling.
Signed and dated at lower right, "Hesse / 1804".
Watermark: none visible due to mount
Stern, Anne Bigelow, donor.
Ryskamp, Charles, ed. Twenty-First Report to the Fellows of the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1984-1986. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1989, p. 347-348.