The painting shows three figures: a prostitute on the left, the client in the middle and the procuress on the right pointing to her palm to indicate that she is expecting payment.

[1] The cropped, close-up figures close to the picture plane against a flat blank background are typical of Utrecht Caravaggism.

The versions in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam[3] and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston[4] are attributed to Dirck van Baburen or his studio.

A copy owned by the Courtauld Institute in London has been identified as the work of the forger Han van Meegeren.

In both of these later paintings the blatant lust depicted by Baburen is contrasted with the genteel, but erotically charged, middle-class world occupied by Vermeer's women.

The older, cruder style of Baburen is relegated to the background, "eclipsing it with the more modern kind of genteel subject that Vermeer would soon paint exclusively".

[5] Philip Mould and Fiona Bruce traveled to Amsterdam where they obtained samples of the paints used by van Meegeren.