Pieter de Groot, a prosperous Rotterdam shipwright who avoided the ruin of investing in the tulip bubble, goes to a Guild of St. Luke auction of the belongings of the de Vos family. Pieter is a shrewd businessman, and the lack of a name for the debtor alerts him to the fact that is something sketchy about the auction.

Another bidder manages to buy Barent’s funereal portrait of the whale, but Pieter discovers At the Edge of a Wood while walking through the house after the auction is over. Pieter is not generally a sentimental man:

[He] has always thought of painters in the same light as stonemasons or engravers, craftsmen who ply a trade. This painting is entirely different, a scene so ethereal that it flinches in the full light of the day (141).

Pieter decides he must have this painting. He threatens to expose the likely scandalous story of the debtor to embarrass the guild if the auctioneer—Theophilus Tromp (the secretary of the guild)—does not let him buy the painting. To sweeten the deal, Pieter offers to pay well for the painting and give the auctioneer a 20% commission.