The drawing comes from an album of studies from the Beauchamp Collection which were numbered by a contemporary hand, the highest in the series being 137. The purpose of the drawings is unknown, although James Byam Shaw suggested they may have been drawn to display 'his virtuosity, like a pianist improvising on his instrument', J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, no. 27. Byam Shaw dated the drawings to after 1770, following Domenico's return from Spain.