Head of a Young Man

The fact that this was once considered to be a drawing by one of the Willes is not surprising. The elder Wille was one of the two most important engravers in later eighteenth-century Paris and an avid collector. His home and studio became a meeting place for northern Europeans in the French capital. His students included the young Austrian painter Jakob Mathias Schmutzer (to whom the present sheet was also once attributed), who eventually became the founding director of the Imperial Art Academy in Vienna. The red chalk drawing style of both Brunn and Schmutzer also owes a great debt to the justifiably celebrated virtuoso technique of the French painter and draftsman Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who was, not surprisingly, a very close friend of the elder Wille and the teacher of the younger Wille.

Indeed, thanks to the writings and correspondence of friends like the elder Wille and Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, Greuze enjoyed greater celebrity in northern Europe than he did in France, and both he and Wille either trained or influenced a number of northern artists and collectors during their stay in Paris.