[1] It was displayed at the Milwaukee Art Museum from 6 February 2009 to 26 April 2009 for an exhibition titled "Out of Rembrandt's Shadow".

[1] The idea of this style of painting was to show possessions and wealth are fleeting and mean nothing when one is faced with death.

[6] The vanitas genre involves subject matter which includes symbols depicting mortality or the perishable nature of material things.

[1] Dutch art historian Pieter J.J. van Thiel stated that the lute case is the oddest item included in the painting.

After studying X-radiographs Van Thiel also believes the bread roll, glass, jug and plate were all added after the painting was completed.

The conclusion is that Van Thiel does not know if the additional items were painted later, or it was an "uncharacteristic working method adopted by the artist".

In the painting he used a skull, a violin, an extinguished candle and an hourglass, ostensibly to illustrate mortality.

The painting was also attributed to Rembrandt for many years until a 2014 examination by experts at the Rijksmuseum determined that it was the work of Lievens.

[10] In the book, Crowning Glories Netherlandish Realism and the French Imagination During the Reign of Louis XIV, Harriet Stone called the painting "complex and richly inconsistent".

[11] Writing for The New York Review of Books, Benjamin Moser stated that the painting is a "large and deceptively simple work".

[3] Writing for Financial Times, Jackie Wullschläger referred to the painting as, "vanitas of leather bindings and shriveled old papers ... and meticulous Dutch realism".

[12] In the book, Still life Paintings from the Netherlands, 1550–1720, the authors said that "the entire work has an impulsive character".

Van Thiel has ascribed new meaning to the painting: he stated that the ledgers are not actually books, but they are files.