The painting was sent from Rome in 1856 together with the other essays made by the painter. It is a small painting with the characteristics of a sketch that represents the study that Scherer shared in Rome with his friend the sculptor Giovanni Chierici, who was also the winner of a pensioner. Both artists are at work: the painter portrayed himself in front of the Alcibiades canvas, the sculptor, pictured on the right, sculpts the group with Hagar and Ishmael. The canvas was exhibited to the public in the same year, as was the sculpture by Chierici, and was drawn by the Society of Encouragement to Count Giovanni Simonetta, and finally entered the Gallery, after its purchase, in 1920. The more academic setting of the previous works here it is redeemed by a sort of more modern "reaction" which is less in keeping with the rigor of the design and the scholastic approach which has been repeatedly advocated by the Parma academics. What is striking about this small canvas, beyond any poetic and sentimental intentions typical of bohemian taste, is the way in which the artist conceives his atelier, portraying himself and his fellow sculptor at work, as in a pleasant scene of a genre rendered somewhat veristically, in which the preference for a rapid technique and a free composition lit by particular light-color effects are almost a prelude to those images of popular and bourgeois interiors, typical of his more mature production.