Vanitas, a Specie house

The painters we borrow from.

In the Dutch Republic of the 1600s a merchant could buy a picture of the things he owned, laid on a table in the dark, with a skull or a candle among them to say that none of it would last. Vanitas paints that picture again, for the things money buys now.

The painters

Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda in Haarlem painted the monochrome breakfast table: pewter, a glass of wine, a lemon half peeled, all in grey and gold. Our tonal key and the white cloth on our tables come from them. Willem Kalf in Amsterdam painted the expensive version, the pronkstilleven, with Chinese porcelain and a nautilus cup glowing out of black. Our dark ground is his. Harmen Steenwyck in Leiden painted the skull, the snuffed lamp and the shell in his allegory of the vanities, which hangs in the National Gallery in London; our snuffed candle is his. Clara Peeters, in Antwerp, painted her own face reflected in the pewter, which is why ours is the house metal.

The house

Specie, a house of satirical painting. Vanitas is one of five houses under it, each painting money its own way: The Hoard, Proof of Wealth, Robber Baron, Trust Fund. For the history of the watch, in plates, there is The Complication.

The pieces are made one way. The house writes the table, the objects and the light; an image model paints the picture; a person checks every picture by eye and throws out any that show a real brand, a real face or a hand with six fingers. The canvas is a giclée print, gallery-wrapped, printed and stretched to order by a fine-art lab.

What we admit

The house is new, and no edition has sold. The pictures are painted by a model, not by a hand, and we say so on every page that sells one. The hand-drawn studies that should sit behind each piece do not exist yet, and the house owes them. And the paintings are, mostly, a joke about people who could buy all twenty-five, made for those same people. Kalf would have understood the arrangement.

Who runs it

PaintedApp, LLC, 1327 SE Tacoma St #394, Portland, OR 97202. Write to support@painted.app and a person answers. The ledger lists every number sold.