Race, class, and gender in David Bailly's 'Vanitas Still Life with Portrait' of 1650

In Dutch still life painting in the seventeenth century, everyday objects acquired allegorical meaning simply by being grouped together in the context of an image. This allegorical meaning, often obscure to viewers today, would have been relatively easy to construe in early modern Holland, within the prevailing semiotic field. In David Bailly's Vanitas Still Life with Portrait (c. 1650), however, the meaning of the painting is complicated by the introduction of three figures that are each given in different registers of representation. One appears in the format of a miniature portrait that presents a seemingly typical, middle-class Dutch man; this is the "portrait" signaled in the title of the painting in the museum in which it currently hangs. An even smaller "portrait" appears as a reflection in an hourglass on the table; this reflected figure stands in the tradition of a kind of artist's "self-portrait," underscoring the painter's presence on the other side of the canvas. The largest of the three figures and perhaps the most enigmatic is a dark-skinned boy, the only one of the three figures ostensibly present within the painted field, who appears wearing some kind of livery.;Vanitas paintings comprise that part of the still life genre that invited meditations on the ephemeral nature of earthly pleasures and, ultimately, on death. The inclusion of portraits within such paintings clearly stood as an invitation to identify the subjects represented; and the meaning of the vanitas would, presumably, have taken on a particular resonance depending on the identity of the subjects in question. However, the inclusion of dark-skinned attendants (of which this painting is one of several examples) raises different issues of interpretation, for such "likenesses" did not function as "portraits" per se. Yet their presence in these paintings is part of a social history of Africans and persons of African descent who lived in Holland and who were an integral (if largely unacknowledged) part of seventeenth-century Dutch life. When it comes to representations in vanitas paintings, there is an implied hierarchy in which the figure of the dark-skinned servant played a pivotal role. This thesis situates the youth in Vanitas Still Life with Portrait within this emerging social history and artistic practice.