Huggins, a Liverpool artist who loved chickens and often painted them, used subtle anthropomorphic tricks learned perhaps from seventeenth-century Dutch painters of the farmyard. Fancy cockerels usually derived from the Continent, and here the artist casts one as a strutting dandy of a chicken, with a distinctly Gallic dash, brooding like Napoleon on Elba amongst his English hens. The late Duchess of Devonshire, who also loved chickens and owned this painting, wrote: ‘I have fallen for paintings of hens too ...William Huggins, taking time off from painting lions, is the artist responsible for another group of poultry, in which the iridescent green and black tail feathers of the cock are brilliantly painted’.

Huggins was an eccentric individual. He preferred the company of animals, especially chickens, to that of his fellow men. He hated travelling through tunnels, and so would get off the train before Liverpool and walk the rest of the way home. His epitaph, which he composed himself, read: 'A just and compassionate man who would neither tread on a worm, nor cringe to an Emperor'.