Maloeuvre's engraving (which is captioned 'The Peasants of Moerdijck'; Moerdijck is a village in Holland near the border with Brabant) shows that in the eighteenth century the picture bore additions on both sides transforming it into a horizontal format. Some areas of the original panel had also been overpainted but these extraneous elements have since been removed, with the exception of the pestle and mortar at lower left. Otherwise the present picture is shown in its present form in an early copy sold at Galerie Charpentier in Paris in 1951.

Margret Klinge (in the catalogue of the Noortman and Brod exhibition) dates the painting to 1627-30, when Brouwer was turning away from the red and pink colouration of the early Haarlem pictures to the predominant monochromy of his later works. William Robinson has pointed out that a sheet of studies in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, includes two sketches for the exhaling smoker at lower right (see the catalogue of the 1984 exhibition, p.165 and fig.2)