The Haarlem artist Pieter Saenredam (1597–1665) and Emanuel de Witte, who worked in Delft and Amsterdam, are generally recognized as the most important painters of architectural views in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. Saenredam was a pioneer in the subject of Dutch church interiors, which became a new way of expressing faith in a country that officially frowned on religious imagery. In the present picture, for example, the younger De Witte offers reminders of youth and age, material things and immortality, for the viewer's contemplation.

De Witte turned to this genre after a decade as a figure painter and brought to it values and an approach that were unprecedented in the field. He transformed a draftsman's domain into something akin to landscape painting, with spaces created by contrasts of light and shadow and by the juxtaposition of near and far forms. De Witte based his early compositions, like this one, on the perspectivist Gerard Houckgeest's exacting views of the Old Church and New Church in Delft, but Houckgeest's example was just a point of departure for an artist attuned to such intangibles as space, light, and mood. In this regard, De Witte anticipated the interests of the two most celebrated Delft painters, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer.