He was "a highly eclectic artist, who did not adhere to a consistent style, technique, or one type of subject for long periods".

Gabriel grew up on Lange Mare and his stepfather, a skipper, must have supported his education, because his mother was a poor midwife.

[2] Metsu was possibly trained in Utrecht by the Catholic painters Nicolaus Knüpfer and Jan Weenix.

[10][2] One of his earliest pictures is The Rich Man and Lazarus at the Strasbourg Museum, painted under the influence of Jan Steen.

To the same period belong the Dismissal of Hagar, in the Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, and the Widow's Mite at the Schwerin Gallery.

[2] Around 1653–1654, Metsu began placing his figures in domestic interiors and specialized in genre scenes on small panels.

[11] Metsu often painted young (single) women who either fed pets,[12] sold goods at market (fruit, vegetables, fish, poultry, or meat), or were grocery-shopping themselves for these provisions.

[13] Another significant painting from this period was The Vegetable Market in Amsterdam, in the Louvre, for which the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition praised ", the characteristic movement and action of the dramatis personae, the selection of faces, the expression and the gesture, and the texture of the things depicted".

This can give the painting a double meaning, such as in The Poultry seller, 1662, showing an old man offering a rooster to a young girl in a symbolic pose that is based on a lewd engraving by Gillis van Breen (1595–1622), with the same scene.

[19] He included several fine examples of minutely depicted floral and cloud band carpets in his works and even a silk oriental rug, as well as so-called "lotto" rugs which he for some reason, in contrast to his meticulous rendering of the floral carpets, depicted only in a very sketchy fashion.

[20] Around the year 1661, Metsu won the patronage of the Amsterdam cloth merchant Jan J. Hinlopen and painted his family more than once in a fashionable surrounding.

Hung in the reception room of Hinlopen's home, the Visit to the Nursery thus alluded to his powerful role in local politics.