Object data
oil on panel
support: height 70.5 cm × width 80.5 cm
Pieter Claesz
Vanitas Still Life with the Spinario
1628
Inscriptions
- signature and date, in ligated monogram, lower left, on a book: PC 1628
Technical notes
The support consists of three horizontally grained oak planks and is bevelled on all sides. The thin and smooth ground is light in colour. The paint layers were smoothly executed, with impasto for the highlights. In the open sketchbook on the floor there is a vague image of a head of a faun to the upper left of the nude women. It is not clear whether this is a pentimento, or a deliberate depiction of a half-erased image in the sketchbook.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 26 August 2004
Condition
Fair. The painting is slightly abraded.
Conservation
- L. Kuiper, 1970: a small hole in the middle of the painting repaired
Provenance
...; the dealer A. Nijstad, Lochem/The Hague, 1956-57;1…; the dealer A. Brod, London, 1957;2…; from whom, £ 1,050, to the museum, 1958
Object number: SK-A-3930
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Pieter Claesz (Berchem 1596/97 - Haarlem 1660)
Pieter Claesz was born in 1596/97 in Berchem, near Antwerp, and not in Steinfurt as was previously thought. He may briefly have been a member of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, for one Pieter Clasen was admitted as a master in its register of 1620.
He settled in Haarlem in 1620/21, where his son Claes Pietersz Berchem (later a famous painter himself) was born in 1622, and where he lived until his death at the end of December 1660. The date of his first marriage must have been before 1622. His second marriage, to Trijntien Lourensdr, took place in August 1635. Documents relating to his life and work in Haarlem cover the period 1628-48, and also record his funeral on 1 January 1661.
Claesz’s name appears in the membership roll of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1634, and on his son’s admission to the guild in 1642 he was referred to as a ‘Banket schilder’ (painter of banquet pieces). Pieter Claesz painted still lifes exclusively, more especially breakfast and banquet pieces, and vanitas scenes. Most of his paintings bear his monogram PC and are dated between 1621 and 1660. His earliest known paintings, most of them breakfast pieces, are in the manner of early Haarlem still-life painters like Floris van Dijck. His mature period shows a grouping of fewer objects in a simpler arrangement and with a monochrome tonality. His works from this period often closely resemble those of his Haarlem colleague Willem Claesz Heda. His later works are more complex, consisting of luxurious displays in bright colours.
He was mentioned as a painter, together with Heda, in Samuel Ampzing’s Beschryvinge ende lof der stad Haerlem of 1628. Claesz’s paintings are frequently listed in 17th-century Haarlem estate inventories, but in the 18th and 19th centuries his name was almost completely forgotten. No paintings with his name feature in 18th-century Dutch sale catalogues, and it was only in 1882 that the monogram PC was identified as his.
Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007
References
Ampzing 1628, p. 372; Moes in Thieme/Becker VII, 1912, p. 28; Bergstro¨m 1957, pp. 114-23; Meijer in Saur XIX, 1992, pp. 353-54; Van der Willigen/Meijer 2003, p. 62; Brunner-Bulst 2004a, pp. 134-35; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 124-26
Entry
In addition to breakfast and banquet pieces, quite a few vanitas still lifes have survived from Pieter Claesz’s early period.3 Most of them are simple compositions with a skull and bones, large yellowed books, an empty or overturned glass, a watch, a small oil lamp that has just been snuffed out, a quill pen, and occasionally musical instruments, often a violin.
In this rather complex still life set in a corner of a room, some of those objects are on a table covered with a green cloth, while the musical instruments are on the floor. Pieter Claesz also added several attributes of painting and drawing: a palette laid out with colours, brushes, a maulstick, an open album of drawings with a nude figure (possibly Fortuna), drawing materials, and a cast of the classical statue The Thorn-puller, or Spinario. Almost all the objects in this painting can be construed as symbols of art and science, and of the transience of life.
Attention was rightly drawn recently to the similarities between this painting and a vanitas engraving in which Hendrick Hondius depicted the attributes of the liberal and fine arts in a room, together with a skull adorned with a laurel wreath, and the inscriptions ‘Memento Mori’ and T’Éynde croont het werck (FINIS CORONAT OPUS), in other words, for anyone contemplating death, life’s ending is the crown on his work.4 Going by the print, it is not only the visual arts (painting, drawing and sculpture) that are represented in this picture, but also music, the art of warfare (armour and helmet) and science (the books).
It is unlikely that the painting is an allusion to the five senses, as has been suggested, with the musical instruments symbolizing Hearing, the drawing and painting implements Sight, the glass Taste, the oil lamp Smell and The Thorn-puller Touch.5 Claesz depicted the five senses in a large still life of musical instruments on a table of 1623, now in the Louvre,6 for which he was inspired by an engraving of 1612 by Dirck Matham.7
In the Rijksmuseum still life, the notion of vanitas expressed in the inscriptions on the print is depicted by the scene set in a corner of an artist’s studio. Almost all the objects could have been used as models for an artist. The classical statue of The Thorn-puller had been one of the most famous antique works of art on view in Rome since the Renaissance. Many artists made drawings of it, and it was also reproduced in numerous copies and casts. The Thorn-puller in the present painting is probably a plaster cast of the bronze, which is 73 cm high. Such casts and copies were also frequently used as drawing models in northern studios, and it seems to have been regarded as an ideal specimen of classical art for 16th and 17th-century artists.8
In Pieter Claesz’s Vanitas Still Life with Violin and Glass Ball of the same year in Nuremberg, the artist working at his easel is reflected in the glass ball (fig. a),9 and a painting from the same period in The Hague (fig. b) shows another painter working on a similar vanitas in his studio.10
What is not clear is the extent to which Pieter Claesz is making a statement about his craft in the present painting. It is certainly true that, practized artist that he was, he has captured the textures and reflections of the various objects with great precision. The smooth, detailed execution and the tonality place this among his earlier output, and there is no trace of the loose and broad monochrome manner of his later paintings.
Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 44.
Literature
Delft-Antwerp 1964, p. 42, no. 19; Vroom 1980, I, p. 29, 31, II, p. 18, no. 52; Gemar-Koeltzsch 1995, II, pp. 232-33, no. 76/8; Eschenberg in Munich 2001, pp. 174-75, no. 59; Brunner-Bulst 2004a, pp. 185-86, 227-28, no. 38, with earlier literature; Klemm 2004, p. 86
Collection catalogues
1960, p. 70, no. 693 A 2; 1976, p. 168, no. A 3930; 1992, p. 47, no. A 3930; 2007, no. 44
Citation
J.P. Filedt Kok, 2007, 'Pieter Claesz., Vanitas Still Life with the Spinario, 1628', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8144
(accessed 2 April 2025 02:37:26).Figures
Image with id "mPiJh" not found, published, or embeddable.
fig. a Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life with Violin and Glass Ball, 1628. Oil on panel, 36 x 59 cm. Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, inv. no. GM 1409. Photo: D. Messberger
Image with id "qsRbj" not found, published, or embeddable.
fig. b Attributed to Jan Miense Molenaer, Painter in his Studio, c. 1628. Oil on panel, 42.2 x 48.8 cm. The Hague, Museum Bredius, inv. no. 191-1946.
Footnotes
- 1 Note RKD.
- 2 Dealer cat. Brod 1957, unpag., no. 3.
- 3 See Brunner-Bulst 2004a, pp. 29, 39, 49, 146-58, 213-14, no. 18, pp. 224-26, nos. 36, 37, pp. 229-30, no. 43, pp. 232-33, nos. 47, 48; Klemm 2004.
- 4 Klemm 2004, pp. 80-86; Brunner-Bulst (2004a, p. 186) also makes the connection with Hondius’s engraving.
- 5 Delft-Antwerp 1964, p. 42, no. 19, where reference is also made to Oertel’s theory that the armour and helmet symbolize power (the vita activa) and that the books allude to science (the vita contemplativa).
- 6 Illustrated in Biesboer 2004, p. 19.
- 7 Haarlem 2004, pp. 39, 41; Brunner-Bulst 2004a, pp. 146-49; Brunner-Bulst 2004b, p. 39, fig. 2, p. 41.
- 8 See Paris 2000, pp. 199-225, for the statue’s critical reception.
- 9 Brunner-Bulst 2004a, pp. 39, 224-25, no. 36 (ill.).
- 10 Blankert in coll. cat. The Hague 1991a, pp. 164, 179, no. 125; see also Buijsen 2001, pp. 22-25. Fred. G. Meijer has rightly pointed to the similarities with two scenes of artists’ studios attributed to Pieter Codde, one of which is in Paris, Fondation Custodia; see Buijs in The Hague 2002, pp. 80-83, no. 10.