In composition this is a variation on the theme of a number of the sketches on coarse canvas probably painted in Rome in 1828 (see No.475 and Tate Gallery 2959, 3380), and also the finished 'Ulysses deriding Polyphemus' exhibited in 1829. But it is very different in technique from the sketches, the paint being worked over, partly with the handle of the brush or even the fingers, to produce infinite gradations of tone; the colouring is also much subtler. The sky is as finished in its more delicate style as that of 'Ulysses deriding Polyphemus' and this may be the beginning of another work for exhibition, in Turner's standard four-foot by three-foot size; indeed MacColl suggested that it was possibly another episode in the story of Ulysses (1920, p.30). It is also related, in reverse, to one of the unpublished Liber Studiorum plates, 'Glaucus and Scylla' (R.73), but the figures in the painting are different and greater in number and there is a suggestion of long, low ships across the water on the right.