Niobe is seated in a clearing below the rocks in an overcast landscape, her arm around her youngest daughter, looking up and defying Latona as the latter's son, Apollo, avenges the Theban Queen's boast that she was richer in her fourteen children than the goddess in her two. Apollo draws his bow to strike down another of the children, some of whom are grouped near their mother, dead, grieving and dying, while two try, in vain, to flee on horseback across a bridge to the right.
