North European School, 17th or 18th century

H.A. Metzger

Department of Fine Arts, Wells College, Aurora, New York, 1960 (as Emmanuel Decritz)

By whom deaccessioned ("Property from the Wells College Collection"), New York, Sotheby's, 29 January 2015, lot 277 (as Northern European School, 17th century)

This varied assortment of exotic seashells—including a nautilus, conches, and cone shells—evokes the distant lands from which they were imported to northern Europe. The costly, tropical specimens, harvested in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, were highly sought after during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a time of widening European colonialism in Asia. Indeed, both the rarified objects and the painting itself would have been understood as luxury collectibles. Within the vanitas still-life tradition, molluscan imagery alluded to worldly transience, thereby inviting spectators to meditate on their own mortality.