Drawing Time

Four female heads—and a phantom of a profile lurking underneath its fully fleshed version in the lower right—emerge from the void of the page. The drawing, Five Studies of a Woman's Head, now in the British Museum, was produced in a single sitting with the model assuming different poses while the artist drew her. He, too, must have changed his position in order to cast a precipitously downward glance at his model's head, as the two radically foreshortened views of it at the top of the page, and three similar, if less abbreviated, ones on another sheet executed during the same posing session, suggest.