On its acquisition in 1932, this panel of inlaid coloured plaster was considered to be an interesting example for technical purposes, no other example being in the Museum's collections at the time. Scagliola, a technique originating in Italy, is plaster coloured in imitation of marble or stone. This relief depicts the legend of Ossian, supposedly a 3rd-century Irish warrior and bard whose poems were collected and translated by James Macpherson (1736-1796) and published in the 1760s. Macpherson, in reality, had collected obscure songs and verses of the recent past in the Irish language, fraudulently rewritten them and then published them as by the fictive Ossian.

John Augustus Richter (1730-after 1809) was the father of the painter Henry J. Richter (1772-1857), who exhibited two watercolours based on the poems of Ossian at the Royal Academy in London in 1792. Richter came to England from Desden before the year 1770 and set himself up as a senior partner in Richter and Bartoli, a firm of Scagliolists (manufaturers of scagliola) located in Newport Street, Long Acre, London. It may have been Henry (the father) who designed this panel, which was later produced in scagliola by his son. In 1795 father and son published an illustrated edition of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, the plates of which were mostly produced by Henry.