The painting depicts a tavern interior where two groups of people are present. In the foreground, near a barrel, a man and a woman are shown holding glasses. In the depths of the tavern, men are playing cards. Paintings of this type were created in dimly lit rooms, portraying characters from the "lower life". Their features and postures were grotesquely caricatural. The interior of a tavern usually has a poor ambience with empty old walls. Soft shadows are created by the subdued light coming from the window. Such genre paintings were popular in seventeenth-century Holland, sometimes serving as a moral lesson about manners and lifestyles for middle-class families, but more often seen as a comic addition to liven up a more serious collection.