The painting's subject apparently satirizes critics of art. At the left, the artist dressed in an extravagant beret and holding a palette and brushes points with his mahlstick toward a panel scrutinized by a rogues gallery of visually impaired observers: among them, a near- sighted gentleman with spectacles and lantern, a woman with a telescope and a bald headed man with a candle. At the left a fool in cockcombs raises a glass and behind the painting within the painting a man holds up a mirror surmounted by an owl - the symbol not of wisdom in the seventeenth century but of besotted ignorance. The mirror, like the reflecting orb hung overhead, is a symbol which may not only allude to the vanity of the world and its critics but also painting's role as a "mirror of nature" (spiegel van de natuer), however flawed. Mockeries of art critics were occasionally treated by other northern artist, including Rembrandt whose drawing on the theme is preserved in the Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Here, however, the crowded composition with the balustrade in the foreground recalls Jan Steen's humorous images of rederijkers.