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Waterhouse finished this in 1916, in the middle of the First World War, when he was in his late sixties and already ill. The scene looks back to Boccaccio's Decameron, written after 1348, in which ten young Florentines flee the Black Death to a country villa and pass the days telling one another stories. Here a man in bright robes reads aloud while a half-circle of women in rich silks leans in to listen. It is a picture about retreating from disaster into beauty and talk, made by a painter who kept working in the older, storytelling manner while newer art moved on around him. The soap magnate William Lever bought it for the gallery he built at Port Sunlight, where it still hangs.