Louis Masreliez was the son of the French sculptor Adrien Masreliez, who worked at Stockholm Palace. Louis studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, then located in a wing of the palace. He travelled to Italy in 1770, via Paris, to study history painting. When Masreliez returned to Sweden in 1783, he received almost exclusively royal commissions for interior design. This history painting of a subject from The Iliad is, characteristically, unfinished.