The AB inventory (1837) describes this item as 'A Cast in Plaster from a small Model of Belzoni which was made by Mr. Brockedon in Wax, in about the year 1825'. It was apparently on display in a showcase with other medals in the South Drawing Room at the time of Soane's death - probably in the inner oval tortoiseshell frame with convex glass in which it remains today. The 1906 Spiers inventory notes that it is "now framed" and hanging in the crypt - someone, perhaps the Egyptologist Curator Bonomi, having put it into the larger square black outer frame and hung it near the sarcophagus discovered by Belzoni.

Although it is dated 'about the year 1825' in Soane's records, this profile portrait relates to a drawing of Belzoni by Brockedon dated May 1823 in the National Portrait Gallery [number NPG2515(1)]. The British Museum describe this NPG drawing as a study for the obverse of the Wells medal of Belzoni produced in c.1821 and commemorating his discovery of the entrance to the pyramid of Chephren at Giza in 1818 (medal BM registration no.M.5597). Below the NPG sketch of Belzoni are sketches of the pyramid which seem to be trials for the reverse of the medal, confirming the association. This Soane model plainly also relates to the medal, for which Brockedon produced the profile portrait although the medal was designed by Thomas Wells and stuck by Edward Thomason. Brockedon's profile portrait of Belzoni was later used as the basis for a lithograph, a copy of which [British Library] is endorsed by a friend of Belzoni as a 'Correct Likeness'. He is usually depicted with moustache and side whiskers as in this profile but there are a couple of painted portraits, one said to be by Brockedon (NPG 829; said to be c.1820), showing him in Egyptian costume and heavily bearded perhaps painted immediately on his return to England from Egypt in 1820 before he shaved his beard off.

William Brockedon (13 October 1787 – 29 August 1854) was a 19th-century English painter and writer, born in Devon. He worked as an artist in London from 1809-15 before travelling abroad. From 1816-37 he was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy and British Institution.

During the summers of 1825, 1826, 1828, and 1829, Brockedon crossed the Alps fifty-eight times and to passed in and out of Italy by more than forty different routes. His fascination with the Alps resulted in the publication, in 1827, of the first part of his Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps by which Italy communicates with France, Switzerland, and Germany, a copy of which is in Soane's library (Soane was offered the original drawings by Brockedon but declined to buy them).