Pieter Claesz's painting combines two types of still life: "breakfast pieces," or representations of a light meal, and "smokers' requisites," or paraphernalia used by smokers. The simple domestic objects are all shown in perspective and in a limited range of colors. Still life was not an independent branch of painting before the seventeenth century, though paintings of religious subjects included still-life objects. Claesz, who

painted still lifes almost exclusively, spent his career devising different arrangements of straight elements and curved objects, as in this work. He became the leading still-life painter in Haarlem, the most important Dutch city at the time.