Walpole wrote in the catalogue of the Society of Artists for 1770, "This was a very bad exhibition, with scarce a tolerable picture, but those of dead game by Elmer." In this livelier view, Elmer has converted the porcelain vase of Gray's poem to a glass bowl in order to demonstrate his expertise in painting goldfish. On the edge of the bowl is Selima, Walpole's tabby, whose appetite cost her her life. On the side is a volume open to Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat. "I am about to immortalize [her] for one week or fortnight," wrote Gray to Walpole on 1 March 1747, adding at the end of the ode: "There's a poem for you, it is rather too long for an epitaph."