With great facility and virtuosity Rubens depicted what appears to be a straightforward genre scene of a village sermon. A congregation of farmers and peasants—men on the left and women on the right—listens with varying degrees of attentiveness to a sermon offered by a potbellied minister standing in a pulpit. It has been suggested that the drawing represents a gathering on Rubens's estate in Flanders and that the congregation may be made up, at least in part, of his employees at the Château de Steen. In the 1630s Rubens painted and drew peasants much more often than before, probably deliberately pursuing Pieter Bruegel the Elder's tradition of peasant depictions.