Jean-Honoré Fragonard studied with Jean-Siméon Chardin and François Boucher in France and then spent some time in Italy. He was immensely successful from his youth, but he refused honors and avoided prestigious history painting, instead making virtuoso half-length portraits in an unprecedented sketchy manner and decorative ensembles celebrating youth and love. It may be because his commissions slowed with the rise of Neoclassicism that he had time to embark on the series illustrating Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso, of which this drawing is a part. The episode shown here is from one of the minor stories in the epic. Olympia, a princess of Holland, had been deserted by her lover, Bireno, during the night. Finding him gone, she ran to the shore, saw that his ship had sailed, and returned to throw herself face down on the bed, her hair flying behind her and her arms flung upward in despair.