Aelbert Cuyp, a leading seventeenth-century artist in The Netherlands, earned fame for his open-air group portraits and his idyllic landscapes, conjuring a kind of Dutch Arcadia. At the same time, in the decade of the 1650s, he painted some mythological scenes in very painterly settings in nature which, like the work at hand, have an evident Italianate influence.

An allegory of trade, a key activity in Dutch life in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, this piece represents Mercury, the god of trade and of the market, and also as the herald of the gods and patron of journeys and travellers. Cuyp renders the god with the usual attributes, although he introduces some variations. Mercury is depicted here as a naked young man wearing sandals (without the customary wings); the usual Hellenic ephebe has been replaced by a youth with Dutch features and a more robust and fleshier body than the classical model. Wearing a winged hat, in one hand he is carrying a caduceus and a bundle of letters—recalling his mission as a messenger to the gods—and, in the other, a number of coin-filled purses. Mercury is standing on a globe of the world, with a number of objects strewn around it, including a notebook, pens, inkpots, stamps and weights, thus completing its allegorical value.

In his depiction of the mythological figure, the artist abides by the conventions of the genre, while in the rest of the painting we can see evident signs of his great plastic sensibility and the characteristic features of his style in the second half of the 1640s. The introduction of views of mountains and the tenuous golden lighting respond to a new concept of landscape, brought back to The Netherlands by painters who had travelled to Italy. He also uses another popular resource of the time in the application of darker tones in the foreground, which, by creating a contrast with the soft brighter colours of the background, further accentuates the perspective. The chromatic warmth and the harmony of lights and shadows produce an overall serene atmosphere that seems to hold the scene in a state of permanent suspension.

The painting is probably the one listed in a sales docket in the name of the Johan van der Linden van Slingelandt in 1785, together with another one purported to represent St Sebastian, though in the view of A. P. Mirimonde it would in fact be an Apollo used as an allegory in honour of Henri-Gaston de Bourbon, Bishop of Metz, Prince of the Holy Empire and Marquis of Verneuil. It is thought that the two paintings on copper, which were separated in that sale, were originally the doors of a small cabinet for storing coins, a customary practice at the time. Over one century later, in 1908, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot included the painting in his catalogue raisonné of Dutch painters. It is believed that, after this information, it passed through the German market and various collections, and was eventually sold in an auction in Lucerne in November 1953 and then later acquired by Banco Exterior de España, whose holdings account for a large part of the current BBVA Collection.