Vanitas Still-Life

Painted by Maria von Oosterwijck in 1688, this thought to be a kind of response to Vermeer’s The Art of Painting. Instead of depicting herself at work with a human subject, we have a complex still-life (“Vanitas” because it includes elements reminding the viewer of their mortality, such as skulls, butterflies, emptying hourglasses, etc…) with an extremely subtle self-portrait as a reflection in the bottle on the left. Which, honestly, I would never have noticed.