the artist studio genre developed in the 15th century in the low countries when artists starting representing themselves in elevated historical guises, either as the evangelist luke painting mary and the infant jesus or as famous painters from antiquity such as apelles, painter to alexander the great. in the 17th-century dutch painters inverted the traditions of the two preceding centuries by rejecting historical guises and idealised settings and substituting more direct, true-to-life images of the painter at work. in flanders, important practitioners of the genre were gerard thomas and balthasar van den bossche and some of smout's works have occasionally been attributed to these better known artists.