This composition depicts the triumphal return to Jerusalem of David and the Israelite army after defeating Goliath, a biblical episode narrated in the Book of Samuel. The painting was signed and dated by the two artists a year apart. The landscape was probably completed first by Brueghel and the figures added a year later by Van Stalbent.

A group of scholars discuss various questions in a room. Some are sitting around tables while others contemplate some of the many paintings and art objects scattered around the room. Depictions of dilettantes or aficionados in collectors´ galleries or rooms ornamented with art objects constituted a customary genre among seventeenth-century Flemish painters, glorifying the practice of collecting as a cultured and sophisticated activity. While the artist´s esthetic is in keeping with the straightf