Still Life with Skull, Books, Flute and Pipe

Tobacco was still a fairly new habit in the Dutch Republic when Steenwijck laid a clay pipe on this table, around the middle of the 17th century. Smoking had spread through Holland only a generation or two earlier, carried in on Atlantic trade, and a pipe of smoke that thins into nothing had already become a favorite emblem for how quickly a pleasure, or a life, is gone. Beside it lies a recorder, a wooden flute whose sound dies the moment the player stops. Those two objects carry the picture's argument. The books stand for learning, the kind pursued in a university town like Leiden, where Steenwijck worked. And the skull says the plain thing outright. This is a vanitas, a still life built to remind you that everything gathered here will pass. Steenwijck kept the palette to quiet browns and greys and let a single fall of light rest on the bone and the pages, leaving the rest to settle into shadow.