Edwart Collier Breda, active before 1663 - 1708 Leiden (?)

Probably Johan van der Marck Aegidiusz., Leiden;
His sale, Amsterdam, de Winter, 25ff August 1773;
His sale, Leiden, 1773;
Sir Robert Gresley, Drakelowe on Trent, by 1912;
Duschnitz collection, Vienna;
Mr. David Hultmark, Saltsjöbaden, Sweden;
David Rapp, Stockholm, by 1920, according to A. Gauffin's catalogue of the Rapp collection;
Anonymous sale, Stockholm, Bukowski, 14 December 1927;
Offered for sale by David Rapp, Stockholm, Bukowski, 16/19 October 1958, lot 124:
Sold by him, Stockholm, Rapp, 10 October 1962, lot 90;
With Johnny Oppenheimer, Tönnersjö, Sweden, from whom bought by the Herwegs circa 1980.

E.W. Moes, in U. Thieme & F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon Der Bildenden Künstler, vol. VII, Leipzig 1912, p. 263;
I. Bergström, Holländskt Stillebenmaleri under 1600-talet, Gothenburg 1947, p. 181, reproduced p. 183, fig. 155;
I. Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, London 1956 (& reprint New York 1983), p. 181, reproduced p. 183, fig. 155;
H. van Hall, Portretten van Nederlandse beeldende kunstenaars, Amsterdam 1963, pp. 400-3;
N. Popper-Voskuyl, 'Selfportraiture and Vanitas Still-Life Painting in 17th Century Holland in reference to David Bailly's Vanitas Oeuvre', in Pantheon, vol. 31, 1973, p. 67;
W. Bernt, Die Niederländischen Maler und Zeichner des 17. Jahrhunderts, Munich 1979, vol. 1, no. 263, reproduced;
N.R.A. Vroom, A modest message: as intimated by the painters of the "monochrome banketje", Scheidam 1980, p. 135-7, fig. 180;
H.-J. Raupp, Unterrsuchungen zu Künstlerbildnis und Künstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden im 17.Jahrhundert, Hildesheim etc. 1984, p. 276.

This is the only recorded self-portrait by Edwart Collier, although it is by no means certain that the figure is indeed Collier himself, since, as Wurfbain has pointed out (see under Literature), in 1684, when the work is dated, Collier would have been approaching his mid forties and the painter represented would appear to be younger than that.  Collier was clearly an interesting character and indeed was married three times within the space of eleven years, between 1670 and 1681, each time in Leiden where he must have attracted quite a reputation by the 1680s.

Collier was obsessed with the Vanitas still-life, and therefore with both the passage of time and the vanity and insubstantiality of man, which may lend credence to the idea that he painted the work as a pictoral lesson for himself or others.  Perhaps, now into his third marriage, Collier painted this as a reminder of less frugal times, of the worldly pleasures and desires that, at least in the context of marriage, he had earlier taken for granted.  Painting himself at the age of his imprudence, indeed grasping a drawing of a young girl, and placing next to him the broken violin string and the skull, would remind him of his former folly in relation to the transience of life and the finality of death.

This idea that Collier here portrayed himself as a younger man is borne out by this picture's obvious debt to his Leiden forebear David Bailly.  As Popper-Voskuyl and others (see under Literature) have noted, this picture is almost certainly inspired by Bailly’s Vanitas Still-life with a Portrait of a Young Painter, Stedelijk Museum ‘De Lakenhal’.  Painted when Bailly was in his late sixties, the young artist bears the features of Bailly himself when about twenty years old and he holds his self-portrait as an old man.  The intention, like that of Collier’s painting, is to demonstrate the transitory nature of human achievement, including his own.  Moreover, the display of objects, as he looks back on life from the perspective of an old man, remind both himself and the viewer of the fragility of worldly pleasures and vanity that life enforces.

The still-life arrangement in the present painting, with a violin preventing a musical score from falling off the table while resting on a closed book and holding open the pages of another, in this case an early 17^th century description of the city of Leiden, with a Roemer to the left and a globe behind, is one often repeated by Collier.  The musical score is from Jan van Eyck's Der Fluyten Lusthof, published in Utrecht in 1646, which is for solo flute, the instrument that the erudite Collier has placed resting upon it.