These are sketches to finalise the anatomical posture of a figure on a war medal, commissioned following British victory in the third Anglo-Ashanti war of 1873-1874, in what is now Ghana. This figure was to become an Ashanti fighter being repelled by uniformed British soldiers in the African bush. The resultant scene of contemporary physical violence is, as elsewhere in Poynter's work, filtered through an adopted Italian High Renaissance style, seen in the gracefully twisted pose drawn here. Poynter felt that Florentine old masters, Michelangelo in particular, had shown physical realism and idealistic treatment to be deeply and properly compatible. A futher influence on the medal may well have been Antonio Pollaiuolo's famous Battle of the Nudes design.