The attribution of this painting has fluctuated between Slingeland and Dou; it can be ascribed to the former with reasonable certainty by analogy with, for example, his ‘Lace-Maker’ (Dresden Gallery), signed and dated 1672. The imagery here exactly follows Dou’s example in the astonishingly precise and intricate rendering of detail, in the subtle fall of light and in the subject of a nursing mother in a modest but model home, with the hearth to one side and the cradle to the other. A mother suckling her child sits before the fire with another child blowing a whistle standing beside her; a cooking-vessel hangs over the fire and a cat sits on the hearth beside a plate and a pot; the carpenter is at work in the background.