Florent Willems (1823-1905) was a student at the Mechelen academy and first exhibited in 1840. He settled in Paris in 1844. With a reputation as a talented restorer, he was commissioned to restore Raphael's St John in the Louvre, a project which occupied him for two years. He achieved great success with his paintings which emulate the painstaking techniques and subjects of seventeenth and eighteenth Dutch genre scenes. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in 1853, an Officer in 1864 and a Commander in 1860.

A young boy, seated on the ground by a wall, facing half to the right, offers a black grape to his dog sitting beside him; the boy's hat lies next to him. Another painting by the artist of this subject 'A young grape picker and his dog' dated 1843, was offered for sale at Christies in February 1991.