Whitfield identified this drawing as an early study for an unexecuted composition of Erminia and the Shepherds which may have been based on G.B. Agucchi's interpretation of canto VII of Tasso's La Gerusalemme Liberata. Two drawings relating to this early composition are at Windsor, J. Pope-Hennessy, The Drawings of Domenichino in the Collection of His Majesty at Windsor Castle, London, 1948. nos. 1265-6 (reproduced in C. Whitfield, op. cit, figs. 1-2). Domenichino returned to the theme in a picture of the mid 1620s in the Louvre (R. Spear, Domenichino, Yale, 1982, no. 84, pl. 262); an Erminia and the Shepherds in the National Gallery, London has also been attributed to him, M. Levey, National Gallery Catalogues: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italian Schools, London, 1971, pp. 75-7 as circle of Annibale Carracci