This striking vanitas still-life painting juxtaposes scholarly and artistic achievements with reminders of the fleeting nature of human life. Daylight streaming into a dimly lit room from an open window at left highlights a marble tabletop adorned with a blue cloth. The cool light illuminates a large skull and femur on the table, softly modeling their smooth, curved shapes. Books and pamphlets of all sizes lie scattered beneath the bones. The books sit neatly shut, their leather covers glinting, while the pages of the pamphlets are curled and bent from frequent use. One of them is filled with small, illegible text. Smoke wafts upward from a just-extinguished candle with a warm ember still glowing at the tip of the wick.
This small panel is one of the finest known works by the Dutch painter François van Daellen. Van Daellen joined the Guild of Saint Luke in The Hague in 1636 after apprenticing with portraitist Joachim Ottensz Houckgeest (c. 1585–after 1644), but little else is known about his life. In other works, such as the vanitas still life in Detroit [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] François van Daellen, Vanitas Still Life, 1692, oil on oak panel, Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Alfred Brod, Ltd. Detroit Institute of Arts / Bridgeman Images, Van Daellen portrayed the same combination of objects on similarly sized panels, but with less compositional unity. He frequently varied the architectural settings of his scenes. Some show arrangements framed within illusionistic stone niches, while others offer glimpses of grander spaces with columns and courtyards. In this painting, Van Daellen has placed the still life behind an illusionistic archway, creating an intimate interior and suggesting the kind of secluded study in which this small painting may have hung. The bright highlights and streaming sunlight set before a dark background, as well as the distinctive vertical format, suggest a date around 1650.
Van Daellen probably derived his combination of books, skulls, femurs, candles, hourglasses, and other vanitas elements from the examples of artists working in Leiden in the 1630s, including Jan Davidsz de Heem (Dutch, 1606 - 1684) and Harmen Steenwijck (1612–1656). Leiden boasted an internationally renowned theological university, as well as a branch of the Plantin publishing house, both of which may have made books an especially evocative subject for that city’s viewers. Books, whose physical permanence can transcend the span of a human life, often suggest associations with scholarly and creative achievements. Some artists made this association explicit by including mottoes such as “non omnis moriar” (I shall not entirely die), “vita brevis ars lunga” (life is short, art is long), or “finis coronat opus” (the end crowns the work) in their vanitas images. These maxims underlined the Christian notion that, for one who has led a virtuous life, death is to be welcomed joyously rather than feared. Worn and tattered books could echo these positive connotations by evoking a life spent in worthwhile study rather than in the vain accumulation and display of worldly goods. An emblem from Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, published in Leiden in 1586, advises, “The use, not the reading of books makes us wise” [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Geoffrey Whitney, "Usus, non lectio prudentis facit," from A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), 171, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (90-B15020). Similarly, in many book still lifes painters celebrated Dutch intellectual accomplishments by depicting specific title pages of plays or volumes of poetry, as in De Heem’s Books and Pamphlets from 1638, in which Gerbrandt Adriaensz Bredero’s Treur-Spel van Rodd’rick ende Alphonsus is prominent [fig. 3]
[fig. 3] Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still Life with Books, 1628, oil on panel, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Acquired in 1918, inv. 183. No specific texts can be identified in the Gallery’s small panel; the issues of scholarly achievement and human transience are broadly expressed rather than identified in a known publication.
Books, however, as with many objects in Dutch still lifes, did not have a single symbolic meaning. Finely bound publications could be seen as objects of vanity, and satirical emblems lambasted profligate book collectors as know-nothings who ostentatiously displayed their books without understanding their contents [fig. 4]
[fig. 4] Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff: Faksimile der Erstausgabe von 1494 / Sebastian Brant; Mit einem Anhang enthaltend die Holzschnitte der folgenden Originalausgaben und solche der Locherschen Übersetzung, und einem Nachwort von Franz Schultz, Basel, 1494, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, PT1509. N2 1913. In this painting the tattered pamphlets could also suggest how fugitive and vain are the accomplishments of man in the face of death. As Geoffrey Whitney warns his readers, amassing huge numbers of books, and even perusing them at length, is a vain endeavor if the wisdom printed on the page is not applied to one’s daily life. Whitney paired this emblem with a second one that depicts a table bearing an hourglass, a candle, and an open tome [fig. 5]
[fig. 5] Geoffrey Whitney, "Studiis invigilandum," from A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), 172, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (90-B15020). His explanatory text advises that idleness will consign one to oblivion, while studiousness will bring fame, and thus triumph over death.
Van Daellen does not prescribe a specific reading of this vanitas still life by means of a painted motto, but the concentration of bright sunlight streaming into the study and the placement of the skull as though looking toward the open window evokes the promise of eternal life. One can easily imagine the owner of this small painting contemplating it in his own study, ruminating on his mortality and hopes for salvation.
Alexandra Libby
June 30, 2017
