Ossian, "the Homer of the North", was the creation of the Scottish author James Macpherson, though his poems were originally claimed by Macpherson to be "Fragments of Ancient Poetry". This drawing is based on Ingres’s oval painting of Ossian commissioned by Napoleon in 1811 for his bedroom in the Palazzo di Monte Cavallo on the Quirinal in Rome (it is now in the Musée Ingres, Montauban). The drawing, dedicated to the architect Lebas, was produced much later, perhaps when Ingres and Lebas were elected to the Institut de France.