Pierre Peyron (1744–1814) won the Prix de Rome in 1773 in competition with his slightly younger contemporary Jacques-Louis David. David won the next year and both artists set out for Rome in 1775. While the artists were in Rome Peyron's avowed preference for classical subjects influenced his contemporaries to turn away from the Rococo style towards Neo-classicism. Even his rival David would later acknowledge his formative role saying "Peyron opened my eyes." He returned to Paris in 1782 and was agréé by the Académie Royale in 1783 and appointed Inspecteur Général of the Gobelins factory. By 1787 he was received as a full member of the Académie. He exhibited his Death of Socrates at the Salon but was eclipsed by David's version of the same subject. Although his post at the Gobelins was abolished during the Revolution, Peyron continued to receive commissions, including official commissions especially under the First Empire.

Pierre Rosenberg was the first to recognize that the figure represented here is a young man rather than a woman.(1) For many years this drawing has been described as a Woman Asleep in a Chair but it is clearly an academy of a young man, probably a studio model, posed with his head leaning on his right hand, sitting with one foot resting on a block. His closed left hand holds an unidentified object and rests in his lap. The figure is covered in draperies arranged to resemble Classical dress. Poses like this are common in the work of Peyron, who often depicted some important figure enthroned on a stepped dais. Occasionally the figure is depicted sitting in this manner, one foot on a step and the other on the floor. Although Rosenberg did not question that the signature was autograph in 1970, he later changed his mind and included the drawing in a list of rejected drawings at the back of his monograph on the artist written with van de Sandt, stating that his doubts had increased since 1970.(2) It is true that the style of drawing is very different from Peyron's other drawings and indeed no other academy of this sort by the artist is known. Usually he executes rather elongated, small-headed figures in a quick and assured manner, often in pen and ink or brush and wash.

Yet might not the technique of the Crocker drawing and the paraphernalia shown in the drawing, such as the block on which the model's left foot is raised, be expained on the basis of the genre of academy figures, which were an institution of the academy? Life classes were held in the academy daily and the figues were always drawn painstakingly in red chalk with white heightening on white paper or in black chalk on blue paper. The fact remains that even though the figure in classical dress fits well with the overwhelmingly Neo-classical subject matter for which Peyron is well known, the style of the drawing does not match any of the examples provided in Rosenberg and Van de Sandt's monograph. However, the artist's signature, which is quite close to known examples and seemingly genuine, is difficult to explain if the drawing is excluded from his oeuvre on grounds of its unusual style.(3)

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