Lopend skelet c. 1656

Editor: Here we have Gesina ter Borch's "Lopend skelet," a pencil drawing from around 1656, now residing in the Rijksmuseum. There's a kind of unsettling humor to it, but I also feel a real sense of unease looking at it. How do you interpret this work? Curator: I see this drawing as a powerful engagement with the 'vanitas' tradition, a meditation on mortality deeply ingrained in 17th-century Dutch culture, but with a distinctly female perspective. Ter Borch, a woman artist in a patriarchal society, uses the image of the walking skeleton not merely as a symbol of death, but, I think, as a critique of the social structures that limited women’s lives. Consider: how does the act of *walking*, of movement, transform the typical still-life vanitas? Editor: It feels like the skeleton isn't just decaying, it's actively…going somewhere? Maybe even protesting something? Curator: Precisely. It's a mobile form of resistance. Where are they walking, do you think? Towards something, or away? Could it represent the precariousness of life, and a woman’s role within a society defined by male dominance and expectations? Editor: I never thought of vanitas symbols as having any subversive potential. Curator: The brilliance lies in Ter Borch's quiet subversion of traditional iconography. By animating death, she also, in a way, animates the constraints placed on women. What feelings does that active movement of the skeleton elicit, considering it in context of other female artists? Editor: It definitely challenges my preconceptions about art from this period. I’ll never look at another vanitas the same way. Curator: That disruption of assumptions, the challenging of established norms, is where art's power to change perspectives truly lies. It leaves us questioning not just our own mortality, but the very structures that define our lives.