Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674-1755), born into a family of painters as the son and grandson of artists, received his initial training under his father near Ascoli Piceno in the Marches region. While acquiring considerable technical skill in traditional painting, he simultaneously developed his talent for caricature—a practice that would eventually become his primary occupation in the latter part of his career and the source of his enduring fame.

During the first two decades of the eighteenth century, Ghezzi worked predominantly for Pope Clement XI Albani, who also hailed from the Marches. His commissions included decorating the family chapel in San Sebastiano fuori le mura, followed by collaborative work with other artists on two major public projects: the nave decorations of San Clemente (1716) and San Giovanni in Laterano (1718). Following the Pope's death in 1721, Ghezzi cultivated relationships with French circles in Rome, particularly those surrounding Ambassador Cardinal Melchior de Polignac.

The drawing under discussion, clearly a fragment of a larger composition, depicts an artist's workshop scene. Upon examination, both the painter and his subject appear to be dwarfs. The characteristic cross-hatching technique and caricatural style strongly suggest an attribution to Pier Leone Ghezzi, whose satirical portraits of Roman society and Grand Tour visitors are well documented. While Ghezzi typically portrayed single figures, examples of multi-figure compositions exist in his oeuvre. A comparable work—a caricatural portrait of the sculptor Bouchardon working on a bust, housed in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana—demonstrates similar handling and supports this attribution (see Edouard Kopp, "A New Portrait of Pier Leone Ghezzi by Edme Bouchardon," Master Drawings, vol. LIII, no. 4, 2015, pp. 481-484, fig. 4).