“It is a true heavenly delight to be able to smear around on such a large canvas; I will do my utmost not to paint anything small again,” Hans Makart wrote in the mid-1860s in a letter to his mother. But how did the painter go about tackling such a huge format? A structure in the artist’s studio made it possible for him to lower the canvas into the cellar below and thus to reach areas that would otherwise have been inaccessible. Makart created this work in just three weeks for the 1876 exhibition of art and applied art in Munich. His earlier stay in Cairo had probably inspired him to paint Hunt on the Nile, an imagined exoticized scene from ancient Egypt. As in many of the artist’s paintings, in this work he was again more interested in a fairy-tale fantasy than in historical reality.