Jacob de Wit's surname entered everyday Dutch usage during his own lifetime: his celebrated grisaille paintings, monochrome works in white and grey that create a convincing illusion of marble relief sculpture, became known simply as "witjes," a play on wit, the Dutch word for white, and remain known by that name today. Born in Amsterdam and baptised there in December 1695, he began his training at just nine years old under the painter Albert van Spiers, before travelling at thirteen to Antwerp to study under Jacob van Hal and immerse himself in the work of Peter Paul Rubens, whose ceiling paintings for the city's Jesuit church he studied closely and later copied in a series of watercolour sketches that, after the church was struck by lightning in 1718, survived as an invaluable historical record of works otherwise lost.
Returning to Amsterdam by around 1715 to 1717, De Wit rapidly became the city's leading decorative painter, so overwhelmed with commissions from 1717 onward that, according to his contemporary biographer Jacob van Gool, he scarcely knew where to begin. He specialised above all in ceiling and overdoor paintings for the grand houses lining Amsterdam's Herengracht and Keizersgracht canals, a number of which retain his work in situ to this day, alongside major public commissions including the monumental Moses Choosing the Seventy Elders for the Amsterdam Town Hall, now the Royal Palace, and ceiling decoration for the Old Town Hall in The Hague. His putti, chubby infant figures typically shown engaged in seasonal or elemental activities, became something of a signature motif, deployed so often across his career that he drew on an established repertoire of poses and attributes. As a Catholic working in a predominantly Protestant country, De Wit was also unusual among Dutch artists of his generation in undertaking substantial decorative work for Catholic churches, becoming the first Dutch painter since the sixteenth century to do so at any scale.
The painting by De Wit held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, studies of putti, a pair, exemplifies precisely the charming, technically accomplished figure work for which he remains best known, offering a direct example of the motif that De Wit, alongside Cornelis Troost, made one of the defining features of Dutch decorative painting in the eighteenth century.