Vanitas Still Life

Look into the glass bottle on the table and you will find a tiny reflection of the room this was painted in, with the painter herself inside it. Maria van Oosterwijck signed the canvas along the table edge in 1668, and the only other place she put herself is that curved glass, small enough to miss. Everything around it is about death. There is a skull, an hourglass and a globe, and a book headed Reeckeningh, the Dutch word for a reckoning or an account. A line written inside reads, we live to die, and die to live. The picture was already recorded in the Habsburg picture gallery by 1730. Later it was sent to the family's collection at Ambras Castle in the Tyrol, and it came back to Vienna in the years after 1806, when the Tyrol had passed to Bavaria and the Ambras collections were moved to the capital.