During the eighteenth century especially Le Sueur (1616–1655) was greatly admired and was considered "the French Raphael." In his own rather short lifetime he occupied a major position in French seventeenth century art. By the time he was sixteen he was apprenticed to Simon Vouet, then the busiest and most famous artist in Paris. He was to remain in Vouet's studio until 1642 at which time he was able to establish his own career. By 1644 he was admitted as a master in the painters' guild in Paris and in 1645 he was commissioned to paint a cycle of twenty-two paintings depicting the Life of St. Bruno for the cloister of the charterhouse in Paris (now in the Louvre), a project that occupied him for three years. By 1649 he was appointed Peintre Ordinaire du Roi and was chosen to paint the May of Notre-Dame de Paris, the large painting presented annually to the cathedral of Notre-Dame by the guild of goldsmiths. He was also among twelve painters appointed to teach at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture founded the previous year. He worked without interruption during the time of the Fronde, and during difficult economic times worked for a private clientele, for whom he often painted subjects drawn from the Bible or ancient history. His style became more serious and somewhat austere and he came to rely on his drawings for details as well as for overall compositional study. The largest holdings of his drawings are in the Louvre and in Besançon, Chantilly and Montpellier.

As was customary Le Sueur made many figure and drapery studies in preparation for his paintings. The figure drawings are usually executed in black and white chalks on gray paper. The darker paper sets off the figure and beauty of Le Sueur's drapery studies. The Crocker's study of a kneeling woman remained unconnected until 1978 when Marguereite Sapin recognized that it was one of the artist's preparations for the Sacrifice of Manoah, the painting commissioned by Monsieur du Lis in 1650 and now in the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse.(1) The story which is taken from the Old Testament (Judges 13: 20) tells of the angel—by tradition the archangel Gabriel—who appeared to the hitherto childless Manoah and his wife to foretell the birth of Samson, who would deliver the Israelites from their enemies the Philistines. In the painting, Samson's father Manoah and his wife kneel before an altar as the angel departs upward in the light of the blazing altar. The figure of the wife is placed behind the kneeling figure of Manoah, who occupies the immediate foreground. In the Crocker drawing, there is a pentimento in the woman's head, which now starts slightly back as if in astonishment, adding dramatic intensity to her reaction. There are at least three other studies for this work including a figure study of a man in prayer (Manoah) in the British Museum.(2) The other studies are sketches in black chalk including a compositional sketch in a Parisian private collection and a sketch for the angel at Windsor, first mentioned by Blunt.(3)

In his preliminary survey of the Sacramento drawings in 1970 Pierre Rosenberg accepted the Crocker study as Le Sueur's, recognizing its similarity in style to several examples in the Louvre, including Study of a Vestal Virgin and three studies of a Virgin and Child,(4) all worked up in black and white chalk on brownish-gray paper. However, Rosenberg rejected the Crocker's other drawings attributed to Le Sueur.(5) More recently Alain Mérot included all four Crocker drawings as autograph in his monographic study of the artist.(6)

Cara Denison, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010