Stillleben mit Büchern

Jan Lievens painted these worn books around 1628 in the Dutch city of Leiden, where he shared a circle of patrons, and something of a rivalry, with a painter his own age named Rembrandt. The two worked so closely that for a long time this very panel was thought to be a Rembrandt. The books are not for reading. They are limp leather bindings and ledgers, stacked beside a jug and a fresh bread roll, a favourite Dutch reminder that ink and paper and everything else wears out. Lievens catches the light sliding across a cracked spine and a curling cover, the used things set behind the new ones.