In the early 1880s, John La Farge worked with a team of artists, including the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), to produce decorations for the home of the American industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt. La Farge's designs made many allusions to the art of the Italian Renaissance and to the splendid decorations created for the Medici banking family in Florence. In this drawing he used a medium common in Italian drawings—red chalk—in self-conscious emulation of Renaissance practice.