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Hotspur🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦 /
npub136m…dnn6
2024-10-02 22:37:44

Hotspur🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦 on Nostr: "Vanitas Still Life," Maria van Oosterwijck, 1868. Van Oosterwijck (1630-93) was a ...

"Vanitas Still Life," Maria van Oosterwijck, 1868.

Van Oosterwijck (1630-93) was a Dutch painter of flowers and still lifes, as many women painters of the period were. Few details of her life are known, except she was a respected artist and smart businesswoman who successfully sold paintings to many noble and royal houses in Europe...but was still denied membership in the painter's guild because of her sex.

Here we have a "vanitas" painting; that is, a still life which includes some morbid subject matter to remind the viewer that life is fleeting. It's common for vanitas paintings to have skulls and other markers of death, but also have money (here, a coin-bag), an hourglass, and other markers of things that change and pass by.

An appropriate message for the Halloween season, eh?

From the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

#Art #DutchGoldenAge #WomenArtists #StillLife #Vanitas #MariaVanOosterwijck

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