Featured Acquisition

Artist Unknown
Flemish, 17th century
A Vanitas Still Life
oil on panel, ca. 1620
17 x 26 inches
Museum purchase, 2008.42

A Vanitas Still Life

The Flint Institute of Arts is pleased to announce the acquisition of an early seventeenth century Flemish painting entitled A Vanitas Still Life. This painting was among the thirty-four works of art presented in the 2006 FIA exhibition To Be or Not to Be: 400 Years of Vanitas Painting, and is now on view in the Summerfield Gallery.

Developed by Dutch and Flemish artists during the seventeenth-century, the vanitas still life is a unique genre of painting that reminded viewers about the fleeting nature of life through a range of symbolic objects. A Vanitas Still Life includes several characteristic vanitas objects that signify mortality—a skull, a small bouquet of tulips with fallen petals, a nearly drained hourglass and dwindling candle. Texts accompany the objects throughout the composition, reinforcing its theme of transience—an inscription in front of the skull warns the viewer: “I was as you are now; you will be in the future as I am.” Ironically, the painting is unsigned and the artist, unknown.

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