A pen and ink drawing of a male opera singer: standing in profile to the left with his right arm outstretched; wearing a plumed onion-shaped headdress, a wide-skirted tunic, a sword and a cloak. Inscribed, on the right: il Caul / Gaspari.

This is a caricature of Antonio Gaspari, recorded as having sung in Venice, 1712-13, 1719, 1724, and 1730-31. He is perhaps represented here as Climene, Principe Reale di Persia, in La Pace per Amore, performed at the Teatro San Moisè, 1719, or as Ariate, Re di Capadocia in Tomasso Albinoni's Laodice, performed at the same venue in 1724.

The drawing belongs to an album of operatic caricatures mainly by Marco Ricci and Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder, an intact album from the library of Joseph Smith. Zanetti and another Venetian collector, Francesco Algarotti, owned similar albums, with many of the caricatures copied or traced, with identifying inscriptions. Zanetti's album is now in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, and Algarotti's belongs to Albert Gellman and is in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. There is a version of this drawing in the Algarotti-Gellman Album: Croft-Murray no. 10. Another version is in Zanetti's album in the Fondazione Cini: inv. 36510. In the same album he is also represented in inv. 36521 and inv. 36650. For another caricature of Gaspari in the Royal Collection, see RCIN 907334.

Opera was an important part of Venetian society and culture, and such caricatures were circulated among friends and collectors for light-hearted amusement. Joseph Smith was a keen opera lover who was married to the English opera singer Catherine Tofts and kept a box at the Teatro San Grisostomo in Venice. He collected operatic caricatures of the singers and performers of the day as well as artists and other well-known characters by Marco Ricci and others, and had them bound into this album. The drawings were shared and circulated among the three collectors and their circle as light-hearted amusement, but the artistic caricature was also a long established practice in Italian art.