The present drawing was part of the collection of Hippolyte-Jean Gosse (1834-1901), one of Geneva’s most fascinating collectors who was described as one of the “most original figures” of the country. Son of the doctor Louis-André Gosse (1791-1873) and Blanche Victorine Cécile Le Texier (1813-1893), Hippolyte-Jean Gosse studied in Paris, where he obtained his doctorate in 1863. Returning to Geneva, he married Marie Kossikovsky (1849-1892) in 1872. From this union was born their daughter Élisabeth Gosse (1876-1963). Hippolyte-Jean Gosse was appointed professor of forensic medicine in Geneva in 1875 and held this position until his death in 1901. However, it was his passion for archaeology, history, culture, and art that cemented his memory in Geneva. Hippolyte-Jean Gosse was director of the Musée archéologique and the Musée épigraphique of Geneva from 1872 and was appointed curator of the Salle des armures at the Musée d’art et d’histoire. Throughout his life, Hippolyte-Jean Gosse amassed a massive art collection, truly remarkable on several levels. Curious, scholarly, and “great collector of ideas, papers, and things”, Hippolyte-Jean Gosse gathered objects of all kinds from various eras and origins, forming an astonishing collection with a focus on drawings.

Related to the Saint-Ours family (Marie-Françoise Saint-Ours, sister of Catherine Saint-Ours, had married Robert-Louis Céard, brother of Hippolyte-Jean Gosse’s grandmother), Hippolyte-Jean Gosse (1834-1901) had privileged access to their works. The drawing at hand was attributed to the Swiss artist Catherine Saint-Ours (1797-1881) when it was, along with the entire collection of Claire Maillart, deposited at the Cabinet d’arts graphiques of the Musée d’art et d’histoire of Geneva. 

Very little is known about Catherine Saint-Ours except that her father Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours initially opposed her pursuing an artistic career, fearing she would suffer the same difficulties as he did. Catherine Saint-Ours nevertheless undertook several trips to train as a painter and seems, judging from the few preserved works attributed to her, to have developed a style extremely close to that of her father. The present sheet shows Five faces of men in the antique style which, according to the documentation of the Cabinet d’arts graphiques of the Musée d’art et d’histoire, could be drawn from Trajan’s Column (see also this closely related drawing). Being certainly an academic drawing executed as an exercise, one can suppose that it dates rather from the artist’s youth.