Laocoon was the Trojan priest who warned the citizens of Troy against bringing the Greeks' wooden horse into the city. He and his two sons were then strangled by two giant snakes which swam ashore, while Laocoon was officiating at the altar of Neptune. This terracotta appeared in the sale of Nollekens's studio effects held on 4 July, 1823. Nollekens freely adapted the famous Hellenistic marble group in the Vatican for this terracotta study, which may be identical to a sketch he exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1805.

Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823) was a prolific sculptor of portrait busts and operated a thriving workshop in London. He spent eight years in Rome from 1762 to 1770, where he worked with Bartolomeo Cavaceppi restoring and copying antique marbles. One of these copies, his group of Castor and Pollux, is in the Museum's collection (Museum no. A.59-1940). He probably perfected his modelling of clay while he was in Rome and started to experiment in making small figures or groups. These occasionally became models for large-scale finished marbles, but many, still in his studio at his death, were simply studies in their own right, which he called pensieri (thoughts).