This picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1849, described as a 'coloured study' for a fresco that Cope painted in the Upper Waiting Hall of the House of Lords that year. It was highly praised by the Art Journal, whose critic wrote: 'If the fresco is brought up to the brilliancy of this sketch it will be a work of extraordinary power.' The cartoon for the fresco was also exhibited, no.903. One of the artists most favoured by the Commissioners in charge of the decoration of the new Palace of Westminster, Cope had already painted two subjects from English medieval history in the Lords' Chamber, and was later to paint a series of seventeenth-century historical subjects in the Peers' Corridor. In the Upper Waiting Hall he was one of six artists (the others being Horsley, Herbert, Tenniel, Armitage and Watts) who were commissioned to paint themes from English literature. The paintings were early victims of damp and, despite various attempts at restoration, no longer exist. They are known today only from engravings and oil versions such as the present picture. A comparable small version of Watts's St. George (from Spenser) was sold in these Rooms on 8 February 1991, lot 157.

Cope painted two subjects in the Upper Waiting Hall, Griselda's First Trial and an illustration to Byron's Lara. Griselda is the heroine of 'The Clerk's Tale' in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, although the story was also treated by Boccaccio and Petrarch, who was Chaucer's source. At the request of his subjects, Lord Walter, an Italian nobleman, agrees to marry, choosing as his wife a humble shepherd-girl, Griselda. He then subjects her to a series of cruel trials to test her loyalty, the first being to send a ruffian to seize her child and, supposedly, kill it. She suffers all these tribulations with exemplary fortitude, and is often seen as the type or embodiment of Patience.