David Leeuw and Cornelia Hooft with their Children

The music on their sheets can actually be read. David Leeuw, a wealthy Amsterdam merchant, and his wife Cornelia Hooft were Mennonites, members of the city's Anabaptist community, for whom singing together belonged to the practice of faith, and the song this family performs is a religious one, its notes and words painted clearly enough to follow. They sit on a terrace with their five children. Weyntje plays the harpsichord and Pieter the viola da gamba, Cornelia and Maria hold songbooks, and the youngest, Suzanna, sits on her mother's lap with a flute. A small dog waits in front.

Abraham van den Tempel signed and dated the canvas in 1671, on a scale of almost two metres each way. The following year France and its allies invaded the Dutch Republic, and Van den Tempel died in Amsterdam before that year was out.