It is believed that this sitter, William Hume of Humewood, belonged to the Irish branch of the Hume family that held peerages in Scotland, England, and Ireland. Sir William was granted Irish estates in the county of Wicklow in 1704 from his father Thomas Hume, who had been persuaded in 1668 to come over from Scotland and inherit the family estates from a childless uncle. Sir William's date of birth is unknown; however, he died in 1752. This portrait was likely painted in the year William reached the age of majority and may coincide with the date that estates were settled on him in 1704. In 1691, the German-born artist Godfrey Kneller, who had studied with one of Rembrandt's pupils in Amsterdam, was appointed by their Majesties William and Mary to the office of "Principal Painter." Upon his appointment, Kneller was knighted, and with the accession of King George I in 1715, he was created a baronet, elevating him to a position unequalled by an official court painter until the 19th century. Kneller was the dominant artistic presence of his age in England. His relentless objectivity in depicting the fashionable courts of three sovereigns reveals his sharp eye for character. He was one of the first artists to concentrate on the portrait as a document concerned with the likeness of a personality. Best known for his Hampton Court Beauties and his Kit Cat series - forty-two portraits of the members of the social-political organization, the Kit Cat Club (Christopher Cat Club) - Kneller set the tone for British portraiture that was to prevail well into the 18th century. To this day, a canvas of the dimensions (36 x 28") Kneller used for the Kit Cat series is called the Kit Cat size.

A teacher, poet, and dramatist, Kokoschka was also an active member of the German Expressionist movement of the early twentieth century. He moved freely from painting to graphic works, generating portraits composed of forceful, expressive lines. These portraits, however, captured more than just the sitters' external features--they also reflected personalities and psychological turmoil. Kokoschka's compassion for lonely and tormented people reveals the effects of war and political crisis, with which he was intimately familiar. He served in WWI and fled Austria in the 1930s to avoid Nazi occupation of his homeland. Kokoschka was outspokenly opposed to the Nazis, who declared his art "degenerate" and included his works in the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich. Kokoschka remained unaffected by the various art movements surrounding him in postwar years, continuing throughout his long life to create highly personal versions of the expressionist art he had been creating for decades.

Death and Woman is a tour-de-force of Kollwitz's skills as an etcher and represents the agony Kollwitz felt when confronted with the suffering caused by war. After Kollwitz moved to a poor section of Berlin in 1891 she gained first hand knowledge of the wretched conditions in which the urban poor lived. Her sensitivity to the lower classes inspired a sense of protest against the working conditions of the day and led to two of her most famous print series, Weaver's Revolt (1893-1897) and The Peasant's War (1902-1908). After she lost her son in WWI, her themes centered on death and pacifism and the timeless subject matter of mother and child. After Hitler came to power in 1933, she was dismissed from her teaching duties at the Berlin Academy, and even though her imagery was used without her permission by the Nazis for propaganda purposes, her political views relegated her to the ranks of artists who were labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis.