You will find this Vanitas still life with portrait of a young painter in the Lakenhal in Leiden. It was painted by David Bailly, a seventeenth-century Leiden master, and there are good reasons to believe it is a self-portrait; we know from other paintings that this is what Bailly looked like. Not much is known about his life; contemporaries have left hardly any accounts of him. He was born in Leiden in 1584 and decided to become a painter after visiting the shop of the engraver Jacques de Geyn. In the winter of 1608 – he was twenty-four years old at the time – Bailly left for Germany and Italy where he earned his living by painting. After five years, ‘weary of travelling’, he returned to Leiden, where he quickly made his name as a portraitist. His clients were drawn mainly from university circles.

He married late in life, in 1642, at the age of fifty-eight. The age of his bride, Agneta van Swanenburgh, is not known. In the spring of 1657 the couple made their will, by which time Bailly was too weak to put his signature to the document. His demise, probably during the last days of October, was entered on 5 November 1657 in the parish register of the Pieterskerk. Bailly's death was clearly not considered a significant loss to the community: the entry in the Pieterskerk was not copied into the municipal burial register.