A charming snapshot of daily life, this drawing depicts two figures conversing outside a cottage. Van Goyen has created an idyllic rustic scene and has manipulated the chalk and wash to produce different textures across the paper, softer tones for the foliage behind the cottage and darker tones for the farming apparatus in the immediate foreground to the left of the composition.
Van Goyen illustrates the same cottage, without the figures, in a sketch in the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris.1
1. Beck, op.cit., p. 235, no. 758