HAINZ, Georg - b. 1630 Altenau, d. 1688 Hamburg

German painter. He was the founder of still-life painting in Hamburg where he became a citizen by 1668. His earliest dated trompe l’oeil still-lifes are from 1665. In 1672, Hainz was in Leipzig, where he painted mainly portraits. After a lengthy trial with the Hamburger painters guild from 1667 to 1681, Hainz became an independent master in 1682. Joachim von Sandrart praised him as “Meister in stilligenden Sachen” (“master in motionless objects”). His students were Christian Berentz and Ernst Stuven.

Hainz painted in the Dutch still-life tradition of the seventeenth century. He specialized in painting collector’s cabinets with precious objects of art. Examples of these paintings are kept in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Kopenhagen, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, and in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

Cabinets of Curiosities

At the time, it was a royal passion to put together collections of “naturalia et artificialia” and to display them on shelves in “Kunstkammer” (“art cabinets”). The cabinets of curiosities (also known as Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, or wonder-rooms) were encyclopedic collections of types of objects belonging to natural history, geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings) and antiquities.

Georg Hainz was a German painter specialized in still-lifes. He often used real objects for his paintings, which he then depicted with artistic freedom. The present painting represents a special type of vanitas still-life.