Death and the Miser
Death and the Miser is one of the most popular compositions by Frans Francken the Younger. Uniquely featuring a convex mirror, this elaborate rendition on copper was acquired from Nicholas Hall by the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
Provenance
Collection of Franziska and Ulrich Haldi, Bern for at least 50 years
Private Collection, United States, by 2024
Sold by Nicholas Hall to the following
Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
essay
Frans Francken the Younger was an extremely popular artist in his native Antwerp during the first half of the 17th century. His inventive repertoire spanned gallery interiors, elegant companies, humorous singeries, as well as religious, mythological and allegorical subjects, of which Death and the Miser was among the most successful. Portrayed in an opulent interior with his gouty leg resting on a footstool, the seated miser is being serenaded on a violin by the figure of Death. The accoutrements of wealth are evident throughout the enfilade of rooms: stacks of gold coins, paintings adorning the walls, a treasure chest, an expensive salt-glazed Westerwald jug, an elaborate 6-armed chandelier. In the adjacent room, an elegantly dressed younger man, with a sword at his side, talks to the same skeletal figure.
Dr. Ursula Härting, who assisted with this catalogue entry, believes that Francken depicts a version of the story of Faust, a classic German legend based on the historical Johann Georg Faust (ca. 1480–1540) who makes a pact with the Devil and exchanges his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Francken fuses this legend with another source depicting Death coming for the Miser (fig. 1) from The Dance of Death series by Hans Holbein the Younger. As in Holbein’s iconic woodcut, printed 1523–26, the rich man hoards his wealth in a barred vault and is haunted by the skeleton figure. In both cases the message is clear: that worldly wealth does not bring happiness, and that death awaits us all.
The convex mirror is perhaps a fascinating quotation from the 1514 Moneylender and His Wife by Quentin Metsys (fig. 2), an iconic critique of mercantile greed. Francken could well have had access to this painting as he had worked in the 1620s for its owner at the time, Cornelis van der Geest (1555–1638), on an altarpiece in Lier alongside Willem van Haecht, the painter and resident keeper of the van der Geest collection. The prominent Antwerp spice merchant and maecenas had an extensive art collection, famously depicted in van Haecht’s kunstkamer painting of 1628 and a few other kunstkamer pictures featuring both imaginary and real art treasures that the painter saw, such as Apelles Painting Campaspe (fig. 3), in which the Moneylender is positioned prominently in the foreground. Indeed, soon after Francken invented the genre of art gallery interiors around 1610, it was taken up by and brought to new heights by Willem van Haecht, Jan Brueghel the Younger, and David Teniers the Younger. Densely packed with paintings, sculptures, musical and scientific instruments, shells and specimens, these rooms depict both imaginary and existing art collections, often with identifiable artworks (Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Gemäldegalerie, 1048).
Many of Francken’s best paintings were collaborations with landscape or architecture specialists, such as Pieter Neeffs the Elder (ca. 1578–1656/61) and Hendrik van Steenwyck II (ca. 1580–1649). In Härting’s view, the checkerboard floor and the enclosed backroom—both distinctive features of the present version—were painted during Francken’s lifetime after the main figural groups, perhaps at the request of a patron who wanted a more lavish interior.❖