According to the Soutine specialist Maurice Tuchman this painting was made in 1915–16 in Paris. It has distinguished provenance and was previously owned by Albert Loeb and Jan Krugier. The portrait depicts Soutine's fellow painter Henry Ramey (1890–1978), who wears a hat with wing-like feathers. This attribute is redolent of Mercury, the winged messenger god of Roman antiquity. The painting was made at a time when Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani had become close friends (Modigliani made portraits of Soutine one example of which is owned by National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). This portrayal of Ramey is tellingly schematised in a manner comparable to Modigliani’s simplified, sculpture-like representations of the human figure; the skin is cool and stone-like, the pupils blank, the eyebrows and mouth elementary. Yet the painting is invested with Soutine's characteristic pathos and portentous emotion. The bohemian painters of Montparnasse commonly sat for one another, and Modigliani made paintings of Juan Gris, Moise Kisling, Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso; but besides Ramey, Soutine painted very few of his artist contemporaries.

The mask-like features in this portrait of Ramey recalls Picasso’s celebrated portrait of Gertrude Stein, made more than a decade earlier in 1905–06, where the sitter's natural face is reimagined with the features of an Iberian mask. This type of work had been a major influence on many artists of that generation, including Modigliani.

This painting was recorded in Pierre Courthion's authoritative catalogue of Soutine's paintings, published in 1972. That text provides the history of ownership for 'Portrait du Peintre Ramey' until the time when it was owned by the International Center, New York. Courthion dated the painting to 1919. However, that date seems unlikely as Soutine had already moved to Provence by that time, while Ramey went back to his home at Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne.