Oberkampf, the French royal manufactory of printed cottons, began to use copper plates in the 1770s, producing monochrome designs that featured skillful crosshatching by the plate designer and engraver to achieve effects of light and shade. This fragment's design was inspired by one of Jean de La Fontaine's fables. Originally published between 1668 and 1694, new editions of the Fables, accompanied by Jean-Baptiste Oudry's illustrations, served as one of Oberkampf's principal design sources in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.