Decamps received his early artistic training in Paris. After traveling through Asia Minor and North Africa, Decamps developed a distinctive practice of rapidly applying thick paint. His freedom of paint handling and rich colors, along with his choice of subjects, marked him as an early champion of Romanticism. Decamps's works show the influence of his extensive travel through Asia Minor and North Africa, which inspired his specialization in small-scale genre and Oriental scenes. He liked to rework favorite motifs, such as the farm yard. The intimacy of the space in this painting reveals the artist’s debt to seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Baudelaire recognized this when he wrote, “sometimes the splendor and triviality of Rembrandt were Decamps’s keen preoccupation.”