Schalcken's well-deserved reputation as a distinguished artist preceded his arrival in London in the late spring of 1692. Up until that point in time, the Dutchman's stature abroad had been largely secured by his copious production as an outstanding genre painter. In fact, a few, scattered pictures of this type by Schalcken were already available on the English art market before he relocated there. Several scholars have noted the surge in auction sales in London during the late 1680s and into the early 1690s. Complex phenomena underlie this phenomenon. It suffices here to note various factors at play in effectuating what became a quite lively auction market, among them, the burgeoning English economy, the relaxing of restrictions governing the import of paintings and, related to these circumstances, increasingly unencumbered entrepreneurial activities within the city itself. Contributing to these circumstances as well were the concurrent rise in the output of contemporary masters active in London and the serendipitous emergence of a few talented businessmen who established successful auction enterprises there at that time.

A respectable number of sales catalogues for auctions survive from the years immediately preceding Schalcken's arrival in England; some 132 of them, all dating between 1689 and 1692, were gathered by the historian, diarist, and politician Narcissus Luttrell (1657–1732) and are housed today en masse in the British Library. A search of Luttrell's collection of sales catalogues yields three genre paintings by Schalcken. Two of the listings, for auctions held, respectively, in November 1690 and in November 1691, refer to what was presumably the same work depicting a woman holding a piece of salmon, with one describing it as “delicately painted.” Yet another auction, which took place in October 1691, contains a listing for what was likely a genre picture: “a small piece finely painted by Schalker.” Another sale occurred the following month, in November 1691, whose catalogue (likewise at the British Library but not found in the Luttrell collection), included, “a droll by Schalka.” In this context, droll is an abbreviated form of drollerie, a word invoked in seventeenth-century England to describe comical portrayals of low-life subjects – so this work too was a genre painting.