As a budding genre painter, Faed transformed this simple life study almost into a subject picture by depicting the model John Mongo as a ‘punka walla’. This was the term for a servant deployed to operate a large rope-controlled ceiling fan (in reality, the taut cord which he holds was a standard art school device enabling a model to sustain a strained or athletic pose). This very accomplished life study secured Faed first prize in the life painting class of the Edinburgh Trustees’ Academy or School of Design in 1847. The meticulous inscription, probably in the artist’s own hand, records not only the precise occasion, but the identity of his model. John Mongo is one of the very few Trustees’ Academy life models whose names have been retrieved.