Matthias Withoos (Amersfoort, 1627 – Hoorn, 1703): Landscape with a Graveyard by Night. A lot of his paintings have a vanitas motif. Vanitas is the Latin word for ‘emptiness’. It corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life. Common symbolic motives in vanitas paintings are among others skulls and flowers; they show the passage of time.
next episode: daguerreotype
Was this painted using a real graveyard as a model or just something from his imagination?
ReplyDeleteGood question, your guess is as good as mine. I can imagine him collecting all kinds of stuff and painting the ensemble in his studio. But he also painted a lot of cityscapes in the open, so therefore he might have visited a real graveyard.
ReplyDelete