'My first pictures like The Destroyed Room emerged from a re-encounter with nineteenth-century art', Wall has said. Here, the work in question is The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix, which depicts the Assyrian monarch on his deathbed, commanding the destruction of his possessions and slaughter of his concubines in a last act of defiance against invading armies.

Wall echoes Delacroix's composition, with its central sweeping diagonal and sumptuous palette of blood reds, while acknowledging its staged atmosphere by re-composing the scene as a roughly fabricated stage-set, absent of any players. 'Through the door you can see that it's only a set held up by supports, that this is not a real space, this is no-one's house,' he has commented. Though clearly a woman's bedroom, the cause of the violence is unexplained, leaving the viewer to speculate on the sequence of events.