This canvas and its companion piece, The Garden of Eden, also in the BBVA Collection, are the subject of a problem of identification, for the Teniers family includes three artists named David, two of them active in the years when these two paintings were dated. The pieces are most probably  the work of Teniers II, also called the Younger (1610-1690), who would have painted them already as an old man with the collaboration of his son (†1685). In the artist’s late production, dating from the 1660s onwards, he forwent his genre scenes crowded with characters in lieu of idyllic scenes where landscape and animals play a more relevant role, as in the case of this depiction of Noah’s Ark, where the subject matter seems to serve as an excuse to show off his compositional skills.

The scene is reminiscent of works by Jan Brueghel de Velours (1568-1625) and his son, particularly in the landscape, the posture of some of the animals depicted and in the leafless tree with birds, and also by Jacopo Bassano (ca. 1515-1592), from the collections of the governors of the Low Countries, of which Teniers was keeper.