Portrait of Professor Gosset was Duchamp-Villon's final sculpture, created in 1917 just before his death in 1918. He contracted typhoid during World War One and was subsequently sent to convalesce at a military hospital in Cannes, where he was cared for by his doctor Professor Gosset, who would become the focus of his last creation. The lower part of the face is obscured by a doctor's mask, the deep eye sockets and oversimplification of the nose and head give a skeletal look to the figure, foreshadowing Duchamp-Villon's own death.

In the exhibition catalogue for Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp's 1957 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, James Johnson Sweeney (the Guggenheim's director at the time), reflects on Duchamp-Villon's final portrait, '... done just before his death hinted at the direction in which the power, drama and sense of form which he embodied in his 1911 Baudelaire might have been carried to new heights.' Examples of Duchamp-Villon's work are held in some of the most significant collections in the world such as Tate, The Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art and MoMA.