This is one of Constable's earliest known drawings; c.f. his copy after Nicholas Dorigny's engraving of Raphael's tapestry cartoon showing Christ's charge to Peter, also signed and dated 1795, in the Colchester and Essex Museum (see Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable Landscape Watercolours & Drawings, 1976, p. 14, fig. 1). It is a copy in reverse, and therefore presumably from an engraving, of Claude's Embarcation of Carlo and Ubaldo in the Art Gallery of Toronto (LV168) which was in England by 1740. The painting is an illustration to Tasso's Jerusaleme Liberata, XV, 1-6