Not everyone in the Dutch Republic enjoyed a Golden Age of material wealth. There were some who found worldly goods and pleasures of the flesh were hollow and fleeting, and expressed that in a new sub-genre of Vanitas.

This stems from a long Christian tradition of the worthlessness of earthly possessions, and the promise of life after death. These are crystallised in the wisdom literature of the Bible, in particular a verse from Ecclesiastes, given in the Latin translation of the Vulgate as vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas, or vanity of vanities, all is vanity, although here the word vanity refers to feelings of emptiness and futility, rather than conceit.

Vanitas paintings thus point to:

• the brevity of life on earth,
• the imminence of death,
• the worthlessness of earthly riches,
• the futility of earthly pursuits and pleasures.

Because those are abstract concepts, the challenge in every Vanitas painting is to find the right symbols, generally accomplished through an allegorical language. They also overlap with other themes in painting such as the Memento mori, the reminder of one’s own mortality.

These have their origins in the Flemish Renaissance, as in Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Vanitas from about 1535-40. This features an unusual androgynous angel with butterfly wings, cradling a human skull with fragmentary Latin inscriptions. Within the skull is an inset window, through which there is a tiny landscape view. This artist started his career in Antwerp, and is thought to have moved to Haarlem after 1550.

When Vanitas paintings first became popular in the Dutch Republic, they were most commonly expressed in carefully composed still lifes. Clara Peeters’ Fruit, Dead Birds and a Monkey (1615-20) shows a typically strange collection of objects: at first glance a basket of fruit, but the grapes are covered with bloom, a peach is going rotten, and there is a fly on an apple. The little monkey, busy feeding from nuts, is gazing at a small pile of dead birds.

These became elaborate and contrived at times, and sometimes involved a self-portrait.

In Peeters’ Vanitas Portrait of a Woman, the artist gazes into the distance, probably a carefully-angled mirror to see her own reflection. Beside her head is a bubble, a sign of Vanitas. In front of her, on the table, are the contents of a still life, with the worldly symbols of Vanitas: gold and silver coins, jewellery, a couple of dice, with their association with chance and earthly pleasures such as gambling.

In Cornelis de Vos’s Allegory on Transitoriness (1620-29), a mother, possibly the artist’s wife, sits looking full of Vanitas, as her two children blow soap bubbles. Around her, the family’s most valuable possessions are piled up: gold, silver, porcelain, a lute, a string of pearls and other jewellery, and the younger child’s foot rests on a sack of cash. De Vos was Flemish, with his workshop in Antwerp, and often collaborated with Peter Paul Rubens.

Carstian Luyckx, another Flemish painter from Antwerp, brings in additional objects to his undated Allegory of Charles I of England and Henrietta of France in a Vanitas Still Life. These include a globe representing the physical world, the gall from a tree, a snuffed-out candle, seashells, and coral. He uses another common device found in Vanitas painting: an open book, here showing King Charles I, who was executed in 1649, and his wife Henrietta Maria of France, who was deposed as queen of England by the civil wars, forcing her to flee to France in 1644.

David Bailly’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols (1651) is a complex web of allegory containing multiple portraits referring to the past. The figure shows him as a much younger man, holding the maulstick he used in painting. His true self-portrait at the time is in the painting held with his left hand. Next to that is a painting of his wife, who had already died, and a ghostly image of her is projected onto the wall behind the wine glass.

Gathered in front of the artist are ephemera and other Vanitas objects: the snuffed-out candle, a glass of wine, flowers, and soap bubbles, together with a string of pearls and a skull. If that message isn’t clear enough, he provides the quotation on a piece of paper: vanitas vanitum et omnia vanitas, together with his signature and date. This painting is also unusual for its innovative use of colour and monochrome passages to distinguish its features from their ground. Bailly worked in the city of the Dutch Republic that became most strongly associated with Vanitas painting, Leiden.

Gerard ter Borch’s younger half-sister Gesina modelled for some of his paintings and trained as a painter herself. Between 1667-69, brother and sister painted this Memorial Portrait of Moses ter Borch (1645-1667) to commemorate their younger brother Moses, also a promising artist, who was killed in the Second Anglo-Dutch War in the summer of 1667. Centred on his full-length posthumous portrait, he’s surrounded by Vanitas symbols, including a snake, butterfly, watch, a small pipe, armour, an hourglass, a skull, shells, weapons, snails, fungal decay, and withering flowers. The ter Borchs worked from Amsterdam, although Gerard seems to have travelled more widely.

Evert Collier’s A Vanitas from 1669 is another collection, showing additional objects which became involved in the allegory, including a sword, armour, fine fabrics, and ornamental feathers. Collier was born in North Brabant, trained in Haarlem, then moved to Leiden.

Some later Vanitas paintings developed the theme of young boys blowing bubbles, as in Karel Dujardin’s Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles, an Allegory on the Transitoriness and Brevity of Life from 1663. Dujardin worked in Amsterdam.

Although there are a few still life paintings from classical Roman times, the first known in modern painting was made by Hans Memling in about 1485, and Caravaggio painting one in about 1599. There were precious few until after 1610, and it wasn’t until the Dutch Golden Age that they appeared in any quantity. Once they started, they quickly became popular, and may have accounted for as much as 10% of all paintings sold in Leiden, for instance. Their success was the result of religious intolerance.

Unlike the Italian Renaissance, the Flemish Renaissance revelled in the faithful depiction of surface textures and adventures in optics. Centres such as Antwerp trained painters in the skills needed, but Flanders and Brabant formed the Catholic Spanish Netherlands, where religious paintings were expected. Artists who followed the Reformed tradition rather than Catholicism or who wanted to paint secular works found themselves oppressed, and many migrated to the north, to paint in the Dutch Republic.

One of the most successful of the pioneer still life painters of the early seventeenth century was also a woman, Clara Peeters, and one of the finest still life painters of any age. We don’t even know when she was born, but she seems to have trained in Antwerp, then pursued her career successfully in the Dutch Republic. She’s thought to have been internationally successful by 1611, when at least four of her paintings were sold to Spain. Her last reliably-dated works are from 1621, although there are a few attributed to her from later.

Venetian Glass, Roemer and a Candlestick (1607) is one of Peeters’ earliest known works, which shows an extraordinary skill in rendering the varied surfaces and their optical properties. It is also one of the first still lifes in which the artist has included their own image reflected in the motif, here the base of the candlestick holder.

As in many still lifes, its contents have interesting symbolic meaning. The confectionery shown is sweet and ephemeral, the ring a sign of earthly riches and temporal relationships, the fly an indicator of earthly decay, and the burning candle combines remembrance with the strict limits on lifespan in this world. This is not just a still life, but an expression of vanitas, the futility and limits of our earthly existence, a theme for a separate article in this series.

Her paintings from 1611 that ended up in the Spanish Royal Collection, and are now in the Prado, move on from that impressive start.

This Table is laid out for a meal, with its range of food and surfaces with different optical properties. Settings for meals, particularly that of breakfast, were later to become a sub-genre in their own right.

Over the coming centuries, still life paintings featuring game were to become popular throughout Europe. Peeters’ Still Life with Game Piece and Poultry is their ancestor. Shells are another vanitas association.

Her Still Life of Fish and a Candlestick is one of the earliest and most accomplished paintings of the fruits de mer, which were to find favour with William Merritt Chase nearly three centuries later.

In the last of these from the Spanish collection, Clara Peeters makes another cameo appearance in its reflections, providing tantalising glimpses of herself.

The following year, her still life with Flowers and Gold Cups of Honour (1612) reveals multiple miniature self-portraits reflected in the gold cup at the right.

In her still life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels from about 1615, her surface and optical rendering is breathtaking, and all thoughts of vanitas have gone. This is a celebration of the thoroughly earthly and sensuous pleasures of food. These are sustained in several of her other later paintings.

She hadn’t entirely forgotten the spiritual dimension, though. Another of her most interesting paintings returns to the concept of vanitas and the ephemeral.

Peeters established herself an international reputation, sold her paintings into major art collections, and pioneered what was to come in the rest of the century, yet is omitted from many accounts of painting in the Dutch Golden Age.

By this time, still life paintings were enjoying growing popularity in the buoyant market of the Dutch Golden Age. Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621) painted this Flower Still Life in oil on copper in 1614, during the early years. He had been born in Antwerp, but because of the threat of religious persecution moved to Middelburg in the Dutch Republic, where he founded a school of floral painting.

At first its eclectic mixture of different flowers and flying insects appears haphazard. These merit a deeper reading, though: the flowers include carnation, rose, tulip, forget-me-nots, lilies of the valley, cyclamen, violet and hyacinth. These could never, at that time, have bloomed at the same time. The butterflies, bee and dragonfly are as ephemeral as the flowers around them. This too has more than a touch of vanitas.

By 1620, still life paintings were much in demand in northern Europe, and had ceased being occasional curiosities. Bosschaert’s career and family business was founded on the still life, which had come of age at last.

Collations of food grew ever more inventive, with Pieter Claesz combining a table of bread and delights in his Still Life with Musical Instruments from 1623. His underlying themes here are the rich browns of the food, wood and tortoise, and their curved forms. Claesz had been born near Antwerp, trained in that city and became a master there in 1620, when he too migrated to the Dutch Republic, where he established his studio in Haarlem.

Other artists developed the still life in the direction of food, as shown in Willem Kalf’s Still Life with Ewer, Vessels and Pomegranate from about 1645. He brings together an impressive variety of surface optical effects too, in this bravura display of technique.

Still life paintings pressed on into culinary exhibitions, usually centred on the breakfast table (ontbijtjes), which in Spain developed into bodegone, populated by caterers and their customers at roadside stalls.

Another fine example is Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with Salt Tub from about 1644, with its combination of bread, fish, sea salt, and an ornate glass goblet with its optical effects.

I’ve already shown some still life paintings including living creatures. Those developed into another sub-genre of dead game, which in turn linked to hunting and the depiction of wildlife.

Jan Weenix specialised in this sub-genre. His Still Life of a Dead Hare, Partridges, and Other Birds in a Niche from about 1675 is one of a large number of finely detailed and realistic paintings which he made. Weenix was born in Amsterdam, where he lived and worked for much of his life, but was a Catholic who worshipped in ‘hidden’ churches that were tolerated in the Dutch Republic.

These piles of animal corpses spilled out into a strangely dark countryside, in paintings such as his Still Life of Game including a Hare, Black Grouse and Partridge, a Spaniel looking on with a Pigeon in Flight from about 1680. These became popular at the time, and Weenix was commissioned to decorate the houses of the rich with large murals on canvas, and to paint series for European royal courts. The more ostentatious paintings were known as pronkstilleven.

Others used the still life as a link to what later became natural history painting.

For their familiarity, bright colours, and natural beauty, butterflies were popular in the Dutch Golden Age, particularly in smaller paintings such as still lifes destined for the collector’s cabinet. Nicolaes de Vree’s undated Forest Floor Still Life with Flowering Plants and Butterflies from the latter half of the seventeenth century is a fine example of a painting that goes beyond the normal still life and depicts a more natural scene.

Still life painting during the Dutch Golden Age flourished and brought commercial success to many artists. It also laid the foundations for several sub-genres which were to be developed later. Far from being the lowest of the genres, for around a century in the Dutch Republic they were among the most innovative and exciting.