In Madrid Lorenzo Tiepolo made various pastels of the kind known as popular types. These took the form of a frieze of half-length figures in the foreground that look out at the viewer and whose gestures relate to the other figures in the composition. Young man smoking, 1770s, like other drawings in the Museo del Prado, is a preparatory study for such works. Specifically, this drawing is linked to the figure smoking a pipe in the pastel Man with pipe and other figures, 1770s, now in a private collection, first displayed in the 1999 exhibition Lorenzo Tiepolo at the Museo del Prado. All of these studies are in red and white chalk, a technique that allowed the artist to recreate the qualities of pastel. Beginning with studies from life, Tiepolo created a repertory of drawings of outstandingly expressive faces that he later used in his groups.

Son of Giambattista and younger brother of Giandomenico, Lorenzo Tiepolo trained in his father’s workshop in the 1740s and 1750s before moving to Madrid with his father and brother in 1762. Unlike his brother, Lorenzo remained at the court in Madrid following his father’s death. By then he was married to the daughter of bookseller Ángel Corradi and had positioned himself as a specialist in pastel portraits. His preference for that technique is somewhat perplexing given his family’s reputation for large, decorative frescoes. However, as Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos indicates, Lorenzo had always played a minor role in those projects and that may be what led him to choose a mode that was enjoying broad international success at the time. Moreover, when Lorenzo arrived in Madrid, he had no Spanish competitors in that medium (Carlos Varona, M. C. de,: Italian Masterpieces. From Spain´s Royal Court, Museo del Prado, 2014, p. 230).