Vaslav Nijinsky was born in Kiev, the son of Polish parentswho were both dancers. At the age of ten he entered the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, and was already being acclaimed as a prodigy before he graduated in 1907. He achieved world fame with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the company which introduced Russian ballet to the West. In 1918, while living in Switzerland to await the end of the war, he began to suffer a mental breakdown which was eventually diagnosed by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler as schizophrenia (a term which Bleuler himself had coined). From 1919 on he was virtually helpless, and was cared for sometimes at home by his wife Romola, with the help of nurses, and sometimes in asylums and clinics. After a period of great hardship during the second world war he was brought by Romola to England, where they settled and where he died in 1950. During the early part of his breakdown Nijinsky would shut himself away all night, feverishly drawing and writing. Many of his drawings include stylised human figures and portraits, all based on the circle. The one shown here seems to belong to a group of less figurative drawings which he produced as his mental state approached a crisis, described by Romola in her biography of him: His study and rooms were literally covered with designs; no longer portraits or scenic or decorative subjects, but strange faces, eyes peering from every corner, red and black, like a bloodstained mortuary cover. They made me shudder. “What are those masks?” “Soldiers’ faces. It is the war.”