Four small children in simple draped white sheets with cut eye and mouth holes stand close together in a row, two of them holding trick-or-treat pails, one pumpkin-colored and one dark. In front is a round wooden bowl heaped with small orange and red pumpkins and gourds, with two full-size pumpkins on the ground to the right.

Dried autumn leaves and sparse flowering branches frame both sides, and a shadowed doorway or archway sits behind the group. Soft, warm light from the front left leaves a dim, dusky atmosphere against a near-black background, with loose brushwork and light impasto in the costume folds, in the manner of a 19th-century academic genre painting.