Vanitas Still Life

A glass lies toppled on its side, an extinguished oil lamp still trails smoke, a watch ticks beside an overturned roemer, and a skull stares out from the clutter. Pieter Claesz composes this vanitas almost in monochrome, browns and silvery greys, the better to weigh light against surface. Every object is a reminder: the snuffed flame, the stopped pleasures, the skull - all proclaim that time runs out and earthly things decay. Now in the Mauritshuis, it is a quietly virtuoso sermon on mortality disguised as an arrangement of things on a table.