Vanitas

This is among the earliest pictures Stoskopff put a date on. He signed it in 1630 in Paris, where he had come from Strasbourg as a young man and would stay for most of two decades. A vanitas was a still life meant to remind you that your own time runs out, and here the young painter states the theme with a bare human skull set among the objects, against a dark, still ground. The order is already unmistakably his, everything placed with cool deliberation, nothing crowded. He would paint larger, richer versions of the idea in later years. This one, made when he was about 33, is where it first carries his name and a date.