St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata. Verso: Composition with a Camel

This sheet is one of three signed drawings representing St. Francis beside a small church on a hillside at the right, each more or less the same scale. A drawing in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, shows the saint kneeling in prayer before a rude cross and holding a crucifix, his rosary looped over his wrist. The third drawing of St. Francis, in the Albertina, Vienna, is in red chalk and shows the saint in a slightly different kneeling posture, without the crucifix and book of the Rotterdam version. All three were probably done as preliminary studies for Pynas's signed painting of the "Stigmatization of St. Francis", whose whereabouts are unknown which was on the London art market in 1930 and again in 1991.