At the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, the technique of drawing in three coloured chalks was commonly employed by French artists known as "colourists", who were influenced by the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, among others. Charles de La Fosse, the leader of the colourists at the French Academy, chooses here to copy the detail of Nestor and his associates from "The Wrath of Achilles", a work by Rubens comprising a series of eight scenes illustrating the life of the hero of Homer's "Iliad". Nestor, seen at the centre of the composition, would later be a model for the depiction of Joseph in La Fosse's greatest work, "The Presentation of the Virgin to the Temple", painted in 1682 for the Carmelites in Toulouse.