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Abildgaard painted The Wounded Philoctetes in Rome, where he studied from 1772 to 1777 on a stipend from the Royal Danish Academy, and it is the picture that made his name. Its subject comes from Homer: the Greek archer Philoctetes, bitten by a serpent on the way to Troy, cried out so terribly over the wound that his comrades abandoned him on the island of Lemnos, from which Odysseus later fetched him back because he carried the bow of Heracles. Abildgaard took the story as an argument about how much suffering a picture may show. The Neoclassicism of the day, and the writings of Winckelmann, asked above all for composure and calm; the museum describes the canvas as a direct challenge to that decorum, and it was one of the very few works by a Danish artist of the period to be copied abroad. The painting entered the Royal Picture Collection in 1849. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).