This is an oil sketch for Hamilton's picture which was commissioned by Lord Compton and completed in Rome in the summer of 1760. The finished picture is now lost. It was the first in a series of six monumental paintings illustrating scenes from Homer’s Iliad which Hamilton painted over the next fifteen years or so. The second to be painted is in the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection, Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus. Hamilton's pioneering neo-classical canvases influenced French painters of the next generation, in particular Jaques Louis David.