/ 
{{ currentSlide }} / {{ totalSlides }}
Frans Francken the Younger

Death and the Miser

Date
ca. 1620s

Medium
oil on copper

Dimension
30 x 23.5 cm

Date
ca. 1620s

Medium
oil on copper

Dimension
30 x 23.5 cm

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.

Fig. 1 Hans Lützelburger after Hans Holbein the Younger, Der Rychman (The Rich Man), ca. 1526, woodcut on laid paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1948.11.128
Death and the Miser was a popular composition, for around ten autograph versions with varying degree of detail and delicacy have survived, yet a prototype has not been identified. Executed with highly refined and impastoed brushstrokes on the largest known sheet of copper, this version, as Dr. Härting notes, is one of the earliest. The elaborate six-branched chandelier in the backroom, typical of the Southern Netherlands (Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp, MPM.V.II.07.045), is unrepeated in the other versions. Another exceptional feature is the circular convex mirror under the vaulted ceiling, where in all other known versions a roundel with a landscape view hang. The reflection shows the Miser’s red beret and Death’s skull reflected from behind, the lattice window to the left, as well as a hint of a brass chandelier or possibly the artist himself.

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).

Fig. 2 Quentin Metsys, Moneylender and his Wife, 1514, oil on panel, Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 1444; MR 821
Fig. 3 Willem van Haecht, Apelles Painting Campaspe, 1628, oil on panel, Mauritshuis, The Hague, 266

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.❖

Frans Francken the Younger, Death and the Miser, ca. 1620s, oil on copper. Exhibited by Nicholas Hall in 2025