A pen and ink drawing of a man standing in profile to the left, with his right hand extended, palm upward: wearing a full-bottom wig, a long-skirted coat and a sword; carrying his tricorn hat under his arm. Inscribed, verso, lower right corner: J S.

This is a caricature of Filippo Balatri, a castrato who travelled widely. He was engaged by Peter the Great in 1690, and went from Moscow to the court of the Great Khan of Tartary. In 1724 he performed in Vienna, and towards the end of his life he entered the Cistercian Order.

This 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. 33. There is a closely related drawing of Filippo Balatri in the Royal Collection: RCIN 907343. Another is in Antonio Maria Zanetti's album of caricatures in the Fondazione Cini, Venice: inv. 36663.

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.