Edwaert Collier Trompe l’œil with a letter rack holding newspapers, letters, writing equipment and a comb

Newspapers, letters and parliamentary speeches all have one thing in common – they are out of date the moment they are written or published. These items, featured in Edwaert Collier’s trompe l’oeil (intended to deceive the eye) letter rack paintings, operate within the long memento mori (remembrance of death) tradition in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, as reminders of the brevity of life and the transitory nature of its pleasures and riches. This brevity is also integrally tied to the trompe l’oeil tradition itself. Trompe l’oeil paintings, as cultural historian Dror Wahrman has succinctly commented, ‘are illusionist deceptions. Usually, momentary deceptions: the real pleasure of a trompe l’oeil is at the moment of realisation that this is not a window but a canvas on a wall pretending to be one’.¹Dror Wahrman, Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age, Oxford University Press, New York 2012, p. 7.

Edwaert Collier is most highly regarded for trompe l’oeil subjects in which he cleverly pins letters, pamphlets and writing instruments on to a wall, holding everything in place with strips of red material. Trompe l’œil with a letter rack holding newspapers, letters, writing equipment and a comb is a classic Collier composition of this type, signed and dated twice 1706. In this painting Collier combines a Dutch newspaper (a copy of the Amsterdamsche Courant, dated 1706), a transcript of Her Majesty’s Speech (Queen Anne) in English and a prominently positioned signature using the English form of his name, on a letter in the centre of the composition, addressed to himself in ‘Leyden’ (Leiden). 

Born in Breda in the Netherlands in 1642, Collier is first recorded working in Haarlem and later in Leiden. Financial documents that survive from the 1670s indicate that at that time Collier was a relatively wealthy middle-class citizen. He is known to have had three troubled marriages dating 1670, 1677 and 1681, respectively. Collier worked principally in Leiden until 1693, when he moved to London. He remained in London for the rest of his life, apart from a brief period back in Leiden between 1702 and 1706. 

Collier’s letter rack paintings from the 1690s and the first decade of the eighteenth century are noted for their employment of many of the same props in an endless play of rearrangement: a small sharp knife, a stick of red or black sealing wax, a comb, a newspaper, a political tract, a white quill pen and letters bearing wax seals featuring a head in profile, both opened and unopened. All of these feature in this painting, pinned with strips of red cloth to an open-grained wooden board that is as much a bravura display of trompe l’oeil painting as the objects themselves. At the bottom left of the painting is a ‘Custing Brief’ dated 1706. Connoisseur of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting Dr Fred G. Meijer has noted that a kustingbrief is a legal document relating to a mortgage bond paid for acquiring property and that this is probably a due bill.²Dr Fred G. Meijer in correspondence with the NGV, May 2020.

Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria 

Notes