A candlelit interior with a young man seated at a table, lighting his pipe

Arnold Boonen was apprenticed to the famous portrait and genre painter, Godfried Schalken, in Dordrecht in 1683, remaining in his studio for six years. His fame took him around Germany before he settled in Amsterdam in 1696, where he succeeded Nicolas Maes as the leading painter of fashionable society. He cultivated important patrons such as Tsar Peter the Great of Russia.

Most of Boonen's genre paintings date from before 1700 and, like Schalken, he specialized in candlelight subjects in the tradition of the Leiden fijnschilders.