This is a copy in oil paint of the watercolour signed and dated 1748 in the Rijksmuseum. Soldiers sit and stand, reading, smoking and playing cards; one studies a map hanging on wall. An open door affords a glimpse of the street outside. The walls of room are hung with two heraldic shields and an oval portrait. Though Trost's image relies on the guard room scenes of the Dutch Golden Age (by artists such as Willem Duyster) it is quite different in its meaning. While seventeenth-century artists viewed soldiers as dissolute idlers, Trost sees them as loyal patriots, surrounded by maps and emblems of the Dutch Republic (with a coat of arms of the Stadtholder-King William III), and attentively listening to a soldier reading a dispatch. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) had threatened the destruction of the Dutch Republic and perhaps made patriotic soldiery more valued.