Prud'hon depicted Andromache several times, perhaps most notably in the Metropolitan's painting Andromache and Astyanax (acc. no. 25.110.14), which was unfinished at the time of his death but completed soon afterward by his student Boisfrémont. The Museum's new drawing was probably among the earliest of Prud'hon's treatments of the scene in which the heroine of Racine's drama (based on Greek legend) discovers in her young son's face the visage of her dead spouse, Hector. At that moment she declares, "C'est toi, cher époux, que j'embrasse" (It is you, dear husband, whom I embrace).

Although he is better known for works in black and white chalk, in this instance Prud'hon drew in pen and ink. He prepared the drawing to be engraved as an illustration for Didot's lavish edition of Racine, published between 1803 and 1805. Prud'hon proudly displayed the sheet at the Salon of 1798 but lost the Didot commission nonetheless to the painter Girodet, largely owing to the intervention of the Neoclassicist master David, who vigorously promoted the interests of his own students.