Vanitas Still Life, Jacques de Gheyn II (c. 1603)

Vanitas Still Life, Jacques de Gheyn II (1603) Jacques de Gheyn II’s Vanitas Still Life is a milestone in art history—widely regarded as the earliest independent still life devoted entirely to the vanitas theme. Against a dark, spare backdrop, symbols of mortality and human folly converge: a human skull, a fragile soap bubble, fading flowers, and the curling smoke of an urn. Within the bubble’s glistening surface, miniature images appear—a wheel of torture, a leper’s rattle—reminders that human suffering and absurdity are as fleeting as life itself. Above, the philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus frame the arch: one laughing at mankind’s vanity, the other mourning it. De Gheyn’s meticulous detail and intellectual layering transform the panel into more than a moral warning—it becomes a meditation on the passage of time, the inevitability of death, and the strange, often contradictory ways we face our own impermanence.   Cotton and polyester canvas on Radiata pine wood frame sourced fr