Between July 1945 and August 1947 Dubuffet drew and painted about twenty-eight portraits of his friend Jean Paulhan (1884–1968), a writer and critic. Paulhan edited the French literary magazine La nouvelle revue française from 1925 until his death. His collected works fill five volumes and encompass books on modern painting; essays on rhetoric, language, logic, and love; and prefaces to erotic literature, including the novels of the marquis de Sade and Pauline Réage's Histoire d'O (1954).

In 1945 Dubuffet had begun creating what he referred to as hautes pâtes, paintings in which a thick paste served as the ground, color was used sparingly, and contours were scratched like graffiti. Consistent with his "anti-art" position, Dubuffet rejected traditional portraiture, which he regarded as facile imitation. Instead of attempting to convey a sitter's likeness or personality, he focused on certain odd features and exaggerated them. In this case, Paulhan's close-set eyes, long nose, broad upper lip, prominent front teeth, and thick mane of hair are easily recognizable.