Originally commissioned for the bathing room at the Château de Bagatelle, it is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The ruined building is flanked by trees and has a set of stairs leading to a pool, where water flows from four fountains.

[5] In his 2006 book Logics of Worlds, the post-Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou analysed the painting as an example of how "pictoral assemblage" fundamentally is about "distributing identities and differences".

[6] He saw the composition of temple, women, statues and water as "a subtle transcendental network of identities", exalted by "figurative differences", which place the painting in the genre of neoclassicism.

[9] The six paintings remained at the Château de Bagatelle until 1808, when Napoleon's Administration des Domaines sold them at auction to Jacques-Nicolas Brunot.