This painting has often been described as a copy after a work by Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682); however, it is more likely to be based on a composition by Murillo's follower Pedro Nunez de Villavicencio (1644-1700). Murillo was the leading painter in Seville in the later seventeenth century, specialising in religious subjects, portraits and genre pictures of children. Murillo remained one of the most admired and popular European artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, explaining why this painting was believed to be a copy after his, rather than his follower's work, when it was first recorded in the Royal Collection in 1818,

Pedro Nunez de Villavicencio was born into an aristocratic family in Seville; although he was initially educated for a military career, he turned to painting at an early age and in 1660 was among the artists who, with Murillo, founded the Academia de Pintura. Núñez de Villavicencio’s style was formed initially in Seville, where he was strongly influenced by Murillo.

This painting is reminiscent of Núñez de Villavicencio’s The Mussel Eaters in that Musée de Louvre, Paris.