"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The line from Ecclesiastes gave its name to one of the most distinctive kinds of Dutch art. A vanitas picture sets out beautiful things, flowers, books, shells, instruments, and places among them a skull, an hourglass, a guttering candle, so the viewer can't admire the beauty without remembering that it ends. Herman Henstenburgh's Vanitas Still Life belongs to the late flowering of that tradition, and it carries a twist most viewers never notice.
It's painted on parchment. Parchment is animal skin, scraped, stretched and dried. Henstenburgh worked in watercolor and gouache on it, which gives his flowers their luminous, almost enamel-like finish, but it also means this meditation on mortality is painted on something that was once alive. Whether or not he intended the irony, it's hard to find a more fitting surface for a memento mori.
Henstenburgh himself was an unusual artist. Born in Hoorn in 1667, he came from a family of bakers, and by several accounts worked in the family trade while making his exquisite paintings on the side. He studied with the landscape painter Johannes Bronckhorst and became known for delicate still lifes of flowers, fruit and birds, prized by collectors who kept them in albums and cabinets rather than hanging them on walls.
Every object here carries a meaning. The skull is the plainest reminder of death. The hourglass marks time running out. Flowers are the classic image of brief beauty, and in many Dutch still lifes the bouquet itself is impossible, combining blooms that flower in different seasons, spring tulips beside summer roses, assembled from separate studies. Such arrangements quietly say that this perfection could never exist all at once in real life. Wilting petals, fallen leaves and insects often appear as signs of decay creeping into the arrangement.
It would be easy to read all this as gloomy, but the Dutch audience didn't necessarily see it that way. The vanitas was a moral and spiritual exercise, meant to turn the mind from worldly things toward what lasts. It also let collectors enjoy expensive, sensuous paintings with a clear conscience, since the picture was, after all, a sermon. Art historians have noted that tension for a long time: the vanitas condemns luxury while being a luxury itself.
That double message is still useful. We live surrounded by images designed to make us want things. A vanitas does the opposite. It shows you something lovely and then gently asks what, in the end, it will mean. The skull isn't there to frighten. It's there to help you choose.
Henstenburgh's Vanitas Still Life appears on our: