Still Life with a Skull

Champaigne painted this vanitas still life in the 1670s, in Paris. He was in his seventies, the leading painter of the French Counter-Reformation, and he had been producing austere religious paintings for the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal for decades. This small still life is a different kind of work: a private meditation on mortality, painted for no patron, meant to be looked at alone. A human skull sits on a wooden table at the center of the painting. To its left, a tulip in a glass vase. To its right, an hourglass on its side, its sand run out. Behind them, a dark wall. The composition is simple, almost diagrammatic. Three objects, three meanings: the skull is death, the tulip is the brevity of beauty, the hourglass is the passage of time. The painting is a memento mori, a reminder that you will die. Champaigne was born in Brussels in 1602 and moved to Paris in 1621, where he trained under Georges de La Tour and eventually became a founding member of the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture. He spent his career painting portraits of Cardinal Richelieu and religious scenes for churches and convents. This still life is one of the few secular works he is known to have produced, and it may have been painted for his own contemplation rather than for a commission. The painting is small, roughly 26 by 20 inches. Champaigne painted with a smooth, controlled surface, rendering the skull with careful attention to the structure of the cranium and the eye sockets. The tulip is white with red stripes, a Rembrandt tulip, the kind that sold for fortunes in the 1630s before the Dutch tulip market collapsed. The hourglass is dark wood with a white sand chamber, its sand completely run through. Oil on canvas, 65 by 50 centimeters. The painting has survived in good condition, with the dark background still deep and the skull still sharply rendered. The surface is smooth, with no visible brushwork, typical of Champaigne's careful technique. The vertical format and dark subject make this print work well in a study, library, or hallway. The dark background means it reads well in low light. A dark wood frame suits the painting's somber tone. The 11x14 or 12x16 size gives the skull and the hourglass enough detail to appreciate up close. This is a public domain artwork. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.