The courtyard of a cottage with a peasant by a fire, vegetables, a pot and a barrel in the foreground

This is an early work, datable to Kalf's period in Paris, where he travelled in the late 1630s, working with the circle of Flemish artists in St Germain-des-Près, until his return to Rotterdam in 1646. The majority of his works from these years are similarly small-scaled rustic interiors and still-lifes dominated by accumulations of buckets, pots and pans and vegetables, arranged as a still-life in the foreground. Figures, as here, usually appear only in the obscurity of the background. Although painted in Paris, these pictures belong to the pictorial tradition practised in the Netherlands in the first half of the seventeenth century, forming an important influence on the circle of the Le Nain brothers.