Harmen Steenwijck

Harmen Steenwijck made pictures designed to remind you that you are going to die. Born in 1612 in Delft in the Dutch Republic, he learned to paint in nearby Leiden in the workshop of his uncle David Bailly, a portrait and still-life painter, and he became one of the finest hands at a very Dutch kind of picture, the vanitas.

A vanitas still life gathers ordinary objects into a quiet sermon about time. In Steenwijck's best-known example, now in London, a skull rests among books, a Japanese sword, a shell and a recorder, with a shaft of light falling across them. Each object stands for something a person might chase, learning, wealth, pleasure, and every one of them is left behind at death.

He worked mostly in Leiden, in the muted browns and greys that suit the theme, and for a time he travelled as far as the East Indies. The record thins after 1656, which is about when he is thought to have died.