A model for the tapestry on the same subject that belongs to a series of eight about the Greek hero. The Story of Achilles is smaller than other projects by Rubens, but the quality of its sketches, models and tapestries make it one of his most important.

Thetis entrusted the education of her son Achilles to the boy´s great-grandfather, the wise centaur Chiron, tutor of gods and heroes, who instructed him in the arts of medicine, music, riding and hunting. Rubens illustrated a riding lesson, for which the centaur, half-man and half-horse, was eminently well suited. A variety of objects allude to other aspects of Achilles´s education. The bearded male term portrayed with a snake coiled around a staff is Aesculapius, the god of medicine, whom several classical sources describe as having studied under Chiron. Homer refers to Achilles´s knowledge of medicine in the Iliad (IX, 631). The female term holding a lyre is one of the Muses, probably Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, but her attribute does not allow for a more specific identification. An ancient source states that Achilles offered a sacrifice to her in the hope that she would teach him music and poetry. The lyre in the tree is a second allusion to Achilles´s musical education. Hunting is symbolised by the two hounds in the landscape and the still life of hunting attributes in the foreground comprising a bow and arrows, a dead hare, a bird and two hunting horns. Rubens based his illustration of the riding lesson on a description of what was probably a fictive painting in Philostratus´s Imagines: Chiron is teaching Achilles to ride horseback and to use him exactly as a horse. The figures of Achilles and Chiron were predominantly inspired by a classical sculpture of the Centaur Tormented by Cupid (Paris, Musee National du Louvre), which had been excavated shortly before Rubens´s arrival in Rome. Rubens had made drawings of it from different angles when it was in the collection of Scipione Borghese.

The modello is deeper in tone than the sketch. The grey imprimatura, which is exposed in much of the sketch, is less visible in the modello. The landscape must originally have resembled that in the sketch, but a hill was subsequently added between the foreground and the mountains in the distance, with trees and a sand path to the right of Achilles. The inclusion of this middle ground creates a more gradual transition between the foreground and background of the picture.

An assistant, possibly Erasmus Quellinus, must have done the preparatory work by copying the sketch accurately to the modello. The terms, the garlands and the architectural elements are pastose and the artist who painted them was probably also responsible for the landscape and the two main figures. Rubens himself presumably introduced most of the changes mentioned above after the sketch had been transferred to the modello (Text drawn from Lammertse, F.; Vergara, A.: Peter Paul Rubens. The Life of Aquiles, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen-Museo Nacional del Prado, 2003, pp. 75-82).