Caricature's prominence in the visual culture of France during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has gained the attention of art historians in the last decade. 1 These studies have tended to emphasize publicly circulated social and political caricature. However, by focusing on graphic satire intended for a wide audience, such discussions overlook other uses that the genre had for artists in the eighteenth century, which are inseparable from sociable practices of drawing. This essay considers the caricatures of the French history painter François-André Vincent and others like them produced by his fellow pensionnaires at the French Royal Academy in Rome between 1770 and 1775 as responses to their shared academic training, to eighteenth-century drawing pedagogy, and to the homosocial environment of Rome.The apparent lack of topical subject matter has relegated the pensionnaires' caricatures to mere examples of artistic versatility and humorous formal experimentation among more serious forms of artistic practice. 2 The caricatures were fundamentally an artistic pastime that resulted in valued mementos of the pensionnaires' experience abroad, and references to these drawings and etchings often include the word "friendship" to describe the relationship between the men involved in their creation. The inclination to situate these works within amicable relationships is understandable. The drawings and etchings represent a group of artists and were reproduced and exchanged amongst the individuals in the group, and thus the caricatures exist within a long tradition of portrait production and