The story is taken from Homer’s Iliad but this incident is very rarely depicted.  The grieving Priam is shown lower right with his daughter Cassandra and the priest Pantheus. On the left is Hecuba, Hector’s mother surrounded by her daughters. In the centre is Hector’s wife who has fainted at the news that her husband has been killed by the Greeks. The picture is a reduced version of the vast picture of the same subject which Garnier exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1800, and again in 1814. The Salon picture was acquired by the Louvre, and deposited in 1872 in the Musée Municipal at Angoulême, where it remains. The composition was one of the most ambitious of all the classical subjects of its time, bringing many figures into the melancholy scene.  The earliest dated version of the picture is the gouache at Mâcon, Musée des Ursulines, of 1792.

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