Completed just two years before his death in 1915, this drawing is likely a result of Gaudier-Brzeska’s spectatorship of wrestling during his time in London and travelling in Germany. The tone and muscularity depicted in the figure reflects just one facet of his extraordinary self-taught drawing style, which ranged from Cubist geometry to suggestions of the Baroque, through to Chinese calligraphy. The range of drawing styles Gaudier-Brzeska employed were firmly established thanks to his frequent trips to museums and galleries, through which he absorbed the workmanship and compositional details of artists as diverse as John Ruskin to Michelangelo. His drawing enabled him to experiment with three-dimensional forms in a two-dimensional format, and which anticipated his extraordinarily broad sculptural output in the short space of time before his tragic death. The present piece was drawn at a time in his artistic development where there is a maturity in his rendering of the human form, and captures his observation of the essential characteristics of an individual figure.