It is housed in the Musée du Louvre in Paris (part of the La Caze bequest of 1869), and was painted in Naples.

Behind him is a vast and luminous landscape, against which the boy stands with a gap-toothed grin, wearing earth-toned clothes and holding his crutch slung over his left shoulder.

Written in Latin on the paper in the boy's hand is the sentence "DA MIHI ELEMOSINAM PROPTER AMOREM DEI" ("Give me alms, for the love of God").

Here the young Neapolitan vagabond seems to be making game of his own infirmity; he is also careful to inform us, by means of the scrap of writing he holds, that he is dumb as well as crippled, because he appeals to the charity of the passer-by with that card written in Latin.

[4] The motif is surely a derivation of taste for scenes of low life in art, as instituted by Caravaggio and followed by Ribera, who was in Naples his most fervent admirer in the realist vein.