 Spurred by the reception of Pandora , in 1825 Etty exhibited his most ambitious work to date , The Combat : Woman Pleading for the Vanquished . This was a huge canvas , 399 cm ( 13 ft 1 in ) across , showing a woman pleading for the life of a defeated soldier as another soldier prepares to kill him . Highly unusually for a history painting at the time , Etty did not base The Combat on an incident from literature , religion or history , but instead painted a scene entirely from his own imagination , based on an idea which had first occurred to him in 1821 . ( He was later to describe this type of painting as " that class of compositions called by the Romans Visions , not having their origin in history or poetry " . ) 
