The portrait is only 14 centimeters wide and 20.2 centimeters high. The character is depicted chest-high against a flat background. Rivière focused all her attention on the facial expression of the youngster. A chamber portrait always suggests confidence between the painter and the model: in portraits of this kind, the most important thing is not the signs of status such as jewels and medals, as in official ceremonial portraits, but the subject’s personality, the look in the eyes, subtle facial expressions. 

 
Little is known about Mademoiselle Rivière. According to the Dictionary of Artists by Edouard Bénézit, Rivière, a painter, lived in Paris in the 19th century (the French school). She learned from Greuze. From the period of 1806 up to 1819 she was exhibiting at the Salon with portraits and genre paintings. The Paris Salon is one of the most prestigious artwork exhibitions of France, regularly organized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Rivière created a number of paintings for the Salon: Woman Doing Embroidery, Sketch of a Head, Portrait of a Man, Portrait of a Woman with a Book, Portrait of a Woman Painting, Portrait of a Woman. All of the above-mentioned titles approximately reflect the subjects of her works. 

 
For France of the beginning of the 19th century, even meager references in the official sources were very important. Many people of those times started painting and sculpture because they considered art to be a source of easy money. The market was overflown with pseudo-art. That is why the participation in the Salons, as well as the presence of the name in the directories, can be considered as a guarantee of professionalism. 

 
The scholars of the Yaroslavl Museum of Fine Arts note that the portrait of a young man reflects the high level of the European art as a whole, because such a wonderfully sophisticated work was created by an artist we know almost nothing about.