Little is known of the life of Jacques des Rousseaux but that he was an artist active in Leiden during the 1630s. His career was brief; he is believed to have been born in Tourcoing around 1600, his dated paintings were executed between 1630 and 1636, and he died in March 1638. During these short years des Rousseaux is thought to have spent some time under Rembrandt’s tutelage around 1628, and like his fellow pupils such as Gerrit Dou, Ferdinand Bol and Isaak de Jouderville, he learnt to almost perfectly repeat his master's character heads, called tronies, and came so close in reproducing Rembrandt’s tonality, chromatics, and his sitters' meditative moods that modern scholarship continually faced the difficult task of separating the works of Rembrandt from those of his skilled pupils. Such was the connection to Rembrandt that the old man holding the music score is the so-called father of Rembrandt, a Leiden model who was used in the years around 1629-31 by both Rembrandt and Jan Lievens (see for example the Bust of an Old Man Wearing a Fur Cap in the The Tyrolean State Museum, Innsbruck). Furthermore, this work was long attributed to yet another Rembrandt pupil, Gerrit Willemsz. Horst, until cleaning following its 1988 sale (see Provenance) revealed des Rousseaux's signature and 1631 dating. 

Des Rousseaux's oeuvre consists of only a handful of paintings which are predominantly depictions of single figures, bust-length, atmospherically lit with a painterly and detailed surface. This, however, is a rare multi-figural composition which can be directly compared with another similarly composed picture from 1631, his Men and Women Making Music, sold by Sotheby's New York, 30 January 1997, lot 21. Both pictures feature the identical patterned table rug, as well the same male model used as the lute player in the present example, and the lone gentleman in the 1997 example.