Wtewael was one of the leading Dutch exponents of Northern Mannerism, and his distinctive and attractive style remained largely untouched by the naturalistic developments happening around him, "characterized by masterfully drawn, highly polished figures often set in capricious poses".

Often the large paintings contain only a few figures, but the small and middle sized ones are extremely crowded compositions, the mythological ones typically including many nudes.

[6] He was very prosperous as a merchant of flax (for the manufacture of linen and canvas), which no doubt occupied much of his time, but was also famous as a painter in his own day, with his reputation reaching as far as Prague, where Emperor Rudolf II obtained his The Golden Age (now Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Producing his highly finished small paintings was probably not very economic, and he was not short of money; his own pleasure and fame were probably his main motivations.

[11] His main Italian base was in Padua, close to Venice,[3] and his earliest works show awareness of the Second School of Fontainebleau, which was probably the result of visiting there.

[16] A gentlemanly contemporary in Utrecht, who might be thought in a good position to know the artist and his work, also praised very highly Wtewael's skill in sculpture, but no clear examples of this are known.

[20] Despite a reasonable amount of documentary records, the leading scholar of his work has written that "Wtewael the man is essentially inscrutable".

[22] The shift in his style can be seen in his largest painting, The Raising of Lazarus (158 x 208 cm) in Lille (illustrated in the gallery below), which though bought as a Spranger in 1900, shows a movement away from the more extreme poses and colours of the 1590s, and even from the drawing which may have been its modello.

[24] In contrast, his few portraits are almost all of his family and are in a conventional and more realist style comparable to that of the leading Utrecht portraitist of his day, Paulus Moreelse (1571–1638), whose works must have been very familiar to Wtewael.

The Bacchus in the gallery section was paired with a Ceres, and perhaps a now lost Venus; these may have been his last works, and show some influence from the Caravaggisti in the single large figures placed as though very close to the viewer.

[7] His biography by Carel van Mander says regretfully that his flax business occupied much of his time, and records examples of his pictures in the collections of two wealthy Dutch collectors.

[30] Wtewael had other means of creating a sensuous atmosphere, such as the suggestive pink mouths of large shells that often lie on the ground below nude females, as in the Louvre Andromeda or the National Gallery Judgement of Paris.

Anne Lowenthal, the most dedicated scholar of Wtewael, has analysed his several depictions of Lot and his Daughters, dating from several periods of his career, and proposes that his treatments are designed to allude to various different possible interpretations of the biblical story, and to pose a "moral dilemma" for the viewer.

[32] His treatments are not without realist elements; the furniture, metalware, and other props are often carefully depicted versions of the luxury products of his own day,[33] and the faces of his Olympians often un-idealized and very Dutch-looking, so that the viewer "often has the sense of seeing flesh and blood figures in bizarre circumstances rather than fantasies tinged by observations from life".

[8] Dutch art theory of the day recognised two "pictorial modes": "'realist' depiction naer het leven (from the life) and 'ideal' imitation uyt den geest (from the spirit or intellect)."

[34] Among his favourite subjects, the Feast of the Gods, typically particularized as either the wedding of Cupid and Psyche or that of Peleus and Thetis, sometimes appeared in Italian Renaissance art, but became especially popular in Northern Mannerist painting.

[35] Among several other compositions of Feasts, Wtewael produced a painted version of this, much smaller than the print or drawing, but still with dozens of figures (illustrated left).