Emanuel de Witte was the most important painter of church interiors in the second half of the seventeenth century. He began specializing in the subject after 1650, when an interest developed in such interiors as viable subjects in themselves rather than for their specific religious imagery. In this painting, de Witte shows the nave and choir of the Nieuwe Kerk, or New Church, with the great organ visible in the distance. Gravediggers are working at the left foreground, having displaced some bones interred earlier. De Witte often included grave-diggers in his church paintings, perhaps as a comment on the transience of earthly life.