The story comes from Herodotos and tells of the attack upon the Massagetae by Cyrus, King of the Persians. Tomyris, Queen of the Massagetae, lost the first engagement of the war during which her son was captured and subsequently took his own life. Tomyris won the return battle, killed Cyrus and then - as she had promised and as seen here - made his severed head drink its fill of human blood out of a wine skin (here replaced with a golden basin). The story exemplified to the Greek (and Renaissance) mind the character of the Scythian barbarian – implacable and bloodthirsty but also (especially in the minds of artists) exotic and magnificent.

This work has been attributed to a range of lesser Flemish artists over the years – Vincent Malo, Theodore Russel and Abraham van Diepenbeeck and more recently Victor Wolfvoet. The design is loosely inspired by Rubens’s 1622-3 treatment of the subject in the Boston MFA. It looks like an oil sketch but there is no known finished painting corresponding with it.

The painting appears in Pyne's illustrated 'Royal Residences' of 1819, hanging in the King's Writing Closet at Hampton Court Palace (RCIN 922133).