Egbert van Heemskerck was a painter of comic low-life genre scenes in the manner of Adriaen Brouwer. He was born in Haarlem, studied with Pieter de Grebber and settled in England around 1680.

This work can be identified and interpreted thanks to several prints made after it, published in London and Amsterdam (examples by Arther Tooker and Carel Allard are in the British Museum).

The verses which accompany these prints make it clear that this image addresses two perceived failings of the Society of Friends (founded by George Fox in Leicestershire in 1647). Firstly that they are canting, holier-than-thou hypocrites: according to the Tooker print ‘Friends as thay terme themselves are mett you see. No sinn in them is fownd they doe agree’; while Allard writes ‘Fronti Nulla fides’ (‘don’t trust appearances’). The only visible sin is the man to the left who may be caressing the woman behind him. The second and main criticism is that the men are allowing themselves to be preached at by a woman; the Tooker print makes it clear that ‘when wemen doe hold forth’ men should stand up to them. Presumably the comedy in this image lay in the fact that its anti-Quaker viewers saw in the simple, bowed-headed postures of the men here not a worthy humility before God, but an unmanly submission to a witch-like harridan.

A smaller version of this work (Sotheby’s 7 June 1950, no. 55) is signed and dated 1685 which provides a reasonable clue as to the date of this painting also.