Storck may have been painting the arrival in the Amsterdam harbour of an important dignitary, or some other official event. Numerous motifs point to a ceremonial reception: the States yacht on the left fires a salute and also flies a, presumably German, ensign and pennant, with the same arms on the stern. The city barge on the right approaches both vessels. On board are various dignitaries. The central figures are the man dressed in black and waving his hat and the man sitting below deck, possibly a German prince, who visited Amsterdam in the last decade of the seventeenth century.

The painting originally hung above an arched door and therefore had a curved hollow at the bottom. At a later stage, a piece of canvas was added to the bottom and painted with waves to give it a rectangular shape. A further addition, probably intended to give the painting more conventional proportions, was a broad strip of canvas atop the composition extending the clouded sky. In the first half of the nineteenth century it was in the collection of J. M. W. Turner.

The added canvas strips now removed have been remounted above and below a black-and-white image of the painting as BHC0931.1.