Room Corner with Curiosities, Jan van der Heyden (1712)
Jan van der Heyden was a Dutch Baroque-era painter, glass painter, draughtsman and printmaker. Van der Heyden was one of the first Dutch painters to specialize in townscapes and became one of the leading architectural painters of the Dutch Golden Age. He painted a number of still lifes in the beginning and at the end of his career.
The Bible in the foreground is open at the famous line from Ecclesiastes: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. As if a stern lecturer were explaining with a cane in his hand, the book seems to force the message upon us: all earthly knowledge and beauty are futile, for in the end comes death, and all that man has accumulated vanishes.
Van der Heyden painted this summative masterpiece at the age of seventy-five, the year he died, and the concept is obviously linked to the sense of the end drawing near. Though he may have felt it vanity, he did after all make a final display of the virtuoso skill which has protected his name from oblivion ever since.
