The Salmagundi Club’s Smith library presents Ghost Image, a group exhibit organized by club member Dan Bunn. Channeling the energy of Halloween, it will be featuring paintings by 15 painters. The Halloween theme of this exhibition harkens back to the Dutch tradition of Vanitas.

Vanitas (Latin for “emptiness”) was a genre of 17th century Dutch painting which used symbolism to evoke the vanity of the living and it’s futility in the certainty of death. To convey the fleeting nature of life, it incorporated macabre motifs such as skulls and clocks to symbolize the fleeting nature of life. Other subjects were more literal in their displays of various states of robustness and decay, such as rotting fruit and flowers.

It became popular as a sub-genre of still life painting during the Dutch Golden Age (1517-1675), and was cultivated during a time of religious tension between the protestant Dutch Republic and their Catholic Spanish rulers.