Jacques De Claeuw Vanitas Analysis

In seventeenth century Holland, still-life paintings became increasingly popular after the

Reformation. Where artists had previously emphasized religious connotation for the Catholic

Church, some still-life paintings used symbolic images to convey death as an inevitable event.

One particular type of the new style of painting was called "vanitas." The vanitas genre focused

on the brevity of life. In other words, carefully chosen objects were tied to powerful symbolic

undertones of man's journey through life expressing the inability to take life's pleasures to the

Vanitas possesses elements of passing time, worldly desires to obtain material objects

in vain, and deliberate tones expressing how we are only nothing in the face of death.

Transience of

Temporal possessions and transitory pleasures along with the study and

acquisition of knowledge all weighed insignificantly on the scales of death. A fact frequently

conveyed was even higher learning was just temporarily a state of the living. Vanitas expressed

a somber mood with everything man attempted to obtain in life, either material or existential

and would always lead to death.

Jacques de Claeuw was principally one of five hundreds artists who painted for the

middle-class and the merchants who found the genre fashionable. He was born in

Dordrecht Holland around 1620 during the Baroque period. All the objects in de Claeuw’s

paintings equally represent mementos of life's passing. Such as roses, hourglass, and a snuffed-

out candle were all meant to be seen as reminders of the transience of earthly existence.

Jacques de Claeuw's painting exemplified that life was short and art was eternal.

The books, inkwell, artist’s pallet are meant to show fleeting and transient worldly

pleasures. A pipe symbolizes one of the more simple pleasures of life. An extinguished