Bartholomäus Bruyn the elder Wesel or Cologne 1493 - 1555 Cologne

Two unidentified wax seals on the verso, one showing a quartered coat of arms;
Another wax seal, with the coat of arms of the Vischer family, Basel;
Dr. Th. Engelman, Basel, as Holbein (the painting was not included in the auction of his estate at the Kunsthaus Pro Arte, Basel, Mary 14-16, 1932);
with J. Kugel, Paris, as anonymous, purchased by the present owner in 1996

In northern Europe in the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, private citizens joined royalty and religious leaders as the subjects of portraiture. These portraits were usually small, painted on panel and not intended to be hung in public view, but rather conceived for more private settings.  Bartholomäus Bruyn, the leading portraitist in Cologne in the sixteenth century was known for such straight-forward depictions of the city’s leading citizens.  Drawing on an earlier tradition, he sometimes paired these portraits with vanitas themes, as a counterbalance to the image of the living, breathing sitter – a reflection on the brevity of human life and an implicit reminder to value the eternal rather than the temporal.  

Vanitas Still Life with a Skull would originally have served as an accompaniment to a portrait.  If one compares it to other works by Bruyn, one finds elements of the composition on the verso of five different portraits by Bruyn, all of women (Westhoff-Krummacher 2, 4, 10, 17 and 22).  Each shows a skull in a shallow niche, two also include candles in a candlestick (fig. 1 [W.-K. 4] and W. K.17) and four have scrolls with inscriptions relating to the inevitability or swiftness of death (W.-K. 4, 10, 17 and 22).  The inscription on the present work is unusual in its use of the word laeti,  poetic Latin for a violent death.  It reappears, with an added clause, in the Portrait of an Ordensritter  (W.K. 20, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).  In the Vienna painting, the vanitas theme is incorporated into the portrait itself:  the sitter holding a skull, an hourglass and a scroll inscribed Vive Memor Leti. Fugit Hora (Live Mindful of Death. Time Passes Swiftly).  In addition to the iconographic and compositional similarities, the directness of the handling and the bold, fresh strokes leave no doubt as to Bruyn’s authorship of the Vanitas Still Life with a Skull . 

The size and shape of the present work tie it to a specific type of portrait, the so-called Kapsel  or covered portrait, which  Bruyn is sometimes credited as having invented.¹ A Kapsel portrait was made up of two small roundels whose frames fit together face to face (see fig. 2).  When the two paintings were put together, the backs of the panels and the sides of the frames formed a low cylinder, protecting the paintings inside and creating a simple carrying case. A number of Bruyn’s Kapsel portraits have survived.  A few consist of paired portrait pairs husbands and wives, like the Portraits of Peter Imhof and Alheid Imhof, Born Brauweiller in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn (W.-K. 69 and 70), which have retained their original frames and still fit together as was intended.  There are also some single portraits extant, but none so far can be securely identified as the pendant to the Vanitas Still Life with a Skull. 

We are grateful to Dr. Kurt Löcher for confirming the attribution to Bruyn on the basis of photographs. 

1Angelica Dülberg, Privatportäts.  Geschichte und Ikonologie einer Gattung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1990,  p. 94 and Hildegard Westhoff-Krummacher, Barthel Bruyn der Ältere als Bildnismaler, Munich 1965, pp. 150 and 151, cat. 74.