The artist repeatedly painted variations of the musical company theme in the late 1620s and 1630s. The present picture, with its bright colouring, would seem to date from the earlier period before the development of an increasingly sombre palette of greys and blacks enlivened by brilliant highlights. It can be compared stylistically with the monogrammed panel dated 1630, in the Rohoncz Collection, Hungary, and with the similarly compact group of figures silhouetted against a plain wall in a sparsely furnished interior found in Das Quartett, Hölscher-Stumpf Collection, Berlin. A weaker version of the present picture, with a basket under the chimney, was with Müllenmeister, Solingen, in 1965, and a copy said to be by Palamedes was with W. Wheeler and Son, London, in 1950.

The theme of the Musical Company emerged from allegorical representations such as the Five Senses, in which music illustrated the sense of hearing. By Pieter Codde's time, the subject has become autonomous; nevertheless, musical instruments, such as the violin in the centre, and the lute on the left, often symbolised vices or virtues, ranging from illicit love to marital harmony, (see the catalogue of the exhibition, Images of Reality, Images of Arcadia, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Sept.-Oct. 1989, no. 12).