Roberts painted this carefully composed work towards the end of his stay in London. It displays his classical training at the Royal Academy Schools and his study of earlier art. The figure of the sculptor is an allusion to Lorenzo Ghiberti’s sculpture and the Renaissance figura serpentina (a pose that Roberts was later to repeat in Shearing the rams). Above all the image alluded to the elevation of art through craft, and of painting with sculpture. The model for the sculptor was the School’s most famous student of the era, Harry Bates.