Vanitas

Three things sit on a stone ledge: a tulip, a skull, and an hourglass with the sand run mostly to the bottom. Together they spell out a single idea, that a flower, a life, and an hour all pass. Philippe de Champaigne painted it in the France of the 1640s, a Flemish-born artist who had grown close to the severe religious circle at Port-Royal, near Paris, whose members prized plainness and distrusted display. That temper is in the picture. There is no clutter and no allegorical crowd, only three objects lit against the dark. The single tulip carried extra weight in those years. Only a decade earlier, Dutch tulip bulbs had changed hands for the price of houses, until that market collapsed in 1637.