Diego Velasquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618), is an enigmatic scene of daily life. An aged woman sits before a terracotta pot, suspended in the seemingly banal action of frying an egg in a shallow pool of oil. To her side, a young boy holds a twine wrapped melon and a glass vessel. The background recedes quickly into darkness — only a woven basket and a wooden post emanates from the shadows. The obscured background seeks to push the figures and their meagre belongings to the front of the picture plane, bringing us into the scene.
Velasquez’s naturalistic treatment of the figures’ belongings is astounding — nothing is left unfinished. The bristly roots of the red onion, the cold sheen of a brass mortar and pestle, and even the dried scarring on the melon. Velasquez wanted us to feel present in this sparse room. He invites us to hear the bubbling of the hot oil and the din of the wooden spoon against earthenware.
Through this dynamic style of painting, we are encouraged to contemplate the present and its fleeting nature. This is typical for Vanitas paintings of this period. Such works often show still lifes or quotidian scenes, with the aim of prompting viewers to contemplate the brevity of earthly existence in the face of death. We can see elements of precarity in this painting, the young always grow old, food goes bad, and at a moment’s notice all that seems stable can be disrupted. Velasquez captures a brief moment in these characters lives through the contention between the intricately rendered foreground and the shadowed abyss behind, reminding us that life is not only the time we spend on this earth, but also the infinity afterwards.
Photo by David Travis on Unsplash
