Three children in a kitchen interior

Jan Woutersz was born in Amsterdam in 1599, the son of a bricklayer. Very little is known about his artistic career; no evidence has yet been found of an apprenticeship with any established painter, and he seems to have operated outside Amsterdam's guild system, as there is no record of him joining the Guild of Saint Luke. He began to use the surname 'Stap' around 1630.

Despite the lack of information around his background and oeuvre, Stap’s manner is undoubtedly distinctive. Albert Blankert drew parallels with the archaicising aesthetic of his near-contemporary Hendrick ter Brugghen, born about ten years before Stap (see A. Blankert, '‘Caravaggio en Noord-Nederland', in Nieuw licht op de gouden eeuw: Hendrick ter Brugghen en tijdgenoten, exhibition catalogue, Utrecht, 1986, p. 28).

A keystone within his corpus of work is The Notary’s Office of circa 1629 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. SK-A-1341), which exhibits a number of similarities with the present painting. Most notable of these is an exaggerated and somewhat distorted perspective, wherein the protagonists are crowded together in a small space, with the tables tilted upwards towards the viewer to display their contents. This contributes to an almost claustrophobic sense of closeness, with the back wall cutting off any sense of room behind the figures, and with tables and furniture jumbled together, intersecting with the figures themselves.