The motif for this drawing is surprising in the Thorvaldsen universe. It has been suggested that he made t his portrait of a heavily pregnant woman for fun, but the reason was perhaps rather that he was simply basically curious as to how to portray this model. She is a quite special figure in Thorvaldsen’s large number of portraits of women. On looking through the paper we suspect that Thorvaldsen was concerned with a motif on the reverse that was considerably more typical of him, the motif of Ganymede and the Eagle.
