Gillis van Tilborgh the Younger's Self-Portrait in the Studio is a delightfully intimate depiction of the artist at work. Portraying himself at about age fifteen, Van Tilborgh sits before his easel, palette in one hand and several brushes in the other. As he turns and stares toward the viewer, his dark eyes, partly opened mouth, and hunched shoulders have a spontaneous character, as though he has been interrupted in the midst of his work. A variety of studio miscellany appears behind the artist, including a jar of oil and bowl for mixing pigments, and pinned to the wall, a freely drawn sketch of a man smoking.

Van Tilborgh was the pupil of his father Gillis Van Tilborgh the Elder and probably of David Teniers the Younger, from whom he derived the pose for this small-scale work. Teniers often depicted drawings tacked to the studio wall in his own work, and Van Tilborgh similarly inserted tacked drawings of genre figures in his paintings. The inclusion of the drawing in this work augments the feeling of authenticity, for artists generally relied on preliminary drawings when executing their paintings. The prominence of the sketch in the Gallery's painting suggests this working process and invites the viewer to imagine the composition in progress on the young artist's easel.