During the Middle Ages, it is said, Venetian glassblowers working on the island of Murano were threatened with death if they revealed any of their techniques to the rest of the world. Thus the secrecy surrounding the way in which this brilliant glass was made was preserved, for the most part, until the late 20th century. Tagliapietra (Talleyuhpeeaytra) began as an apprentice on the Venetian island of Murano when he was eleven. Later, as a master glassblower, Tagliapietra taught and partnered with Dale Chihuly at Pilchuck Glass School and in 1998 collaborated with Steuben at their factory as artist-in-residence, working for the first time in clear crystal. He has had a direct impact on the American studio glass movement and continues to create, working with heat and smoke, noise, steel tools, and red hot glass to create fragile forms in a process he describes as "having a conversation with the furnace."

In the tradition of Hieronymus Bosch, Teniers also painted witches and demons, and also a form of genre painting that substituted monkeys for human figures. This painted allegory of the Last Judgment includes all of these figures. The inscription on the millstone reads Het end dracht de Last ("The end bears the burden"). However, the inscription on the banner, De pinster blom, is more obscure. It may refer to a flower (blom) associated with Pentecost, which in German is translated pinkster. David Teniers was the son and father of painters of the same name. He married Anna Bruegel, the daughter of another prominent painting family, and became dean of the Guild of St. Luke's, Antwerp, in 1645. Teniers enjoyed the patronage of prominent church officials, and also of the newly appointed governor of the southern Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who made Teniers court painter in Brussels and curator of his painting collection. After Leopold Wilhelm left the southern Netherlands, Teniers remained as court painter to the new governor, Don Juan of Austria, whom he taught to draw and paint. Teniers later opened an art academy in Antwerp in 1665. An unusually prolific artist, Teniers enjoyed exceptional patronage and privilege, and along with Adriaen Brouwer, was an important 17th century Flemish painter of low-life genre scenes.

Ter Brugghen painted many genre scenes, or scenes of everyday life, mostly either "merry companies" or single figures, on a simple background in a closed compositional arrangement close to the picture plane, three-quarters in length, with dramatic or artificial light. Much has been written about the popularity of Dutch "merry company" paintings-depicting drunkeness, gambling, revelry, prostitution and lewd behavior-and their meaning for the strict, devout Protestants of the Northern Netherlands. Scholars suggest that behind the apparent jollity lurked an assumption that pleasure was wasteful and transitory. Ter Brugghen's affinity for the solitary musician was common among artists, from Italy and other countries, who emulated Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's style of painting. These Caravaggisti copied his dramatic torch-lit or candle-lit settings and brutally realistic style, particularly popular among painters in Ter Brugghen's hometown of Utrecht. However, what differentiates Ter Brugghen's The Singing Lute Player, is its self-contained quality, its removal from the viewer-a characteristic foreign to Caravaggio's work. Ter Brugghen's particular innovation was the silhouetting of figures against a light ground (a device later utilized by Jan Vermeer), tempered here by a more complex light-on-dark/dark-on-light arrangement. The Singing Lute Player is believed to be one of at least three original versions by Ter Brugghen based on one of only two authenticated Ter Brugghen drawings. This version is the only one presently in the United States.