This design made in about 1766 by Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823) depicts a woman suckling a baby with her arm hanging over a funerary urn and with a child at her feet on a sarcophagus or a funeral receptacle for a corpse, most commonly carved or cut from stone. The design is for a funeral monument for an unknown woman. It suggests that she died perhaps in childbirth along with her baby. A portrait medallion of the woman is faintly visible on the sarcophagus that supports this group. Nollekens is best known as the leading portrait sculptor in Britain between 1770 and 1815. With his fellow Royal Academicians Thomas Banks and John Flaxman he established the British School of sculpture following decades of dependence on immigrant sculptors (such as Rysbrack, Scheemakers and Roubiliac). Flaxman praised Nollekens as the only sculptor before Banks who had "formed his taste on the antique and introduced a purer style of art". The opportunities to study the antique were plentiful whilst Nollekens lived for eight years from 1762-1770 in Rome. As a draughtsman he was exceptionally well trained for his day.