Still Life with Books and a Globe

This 1667 panel at the Philadelphia Museum of Art pairs two of van der Heyden's most characteristic still-life elements — books and a globe — in a composition that is stripped of the additional sculptural and scientific objects present in some of his more elaborate intellectual still lifes. The pairing of books and globe was a standard emblem of human learning in Northern European painting, combining written knowledge with geographic knowledge in a single image. The Philadelphia Museum holds two van der Heyden panels from this period (alongside the ideal landscape), giving the American collection an unusually concentrated example of his thematic range. By 1667 van der Heyden was producing both architectural city views and these intimate still lifes simultaneously — the two types sharing a common interest in the precise description of surfaces but applying it to entirely different pictorial worlds.

Oil on panel, with the intimate scale and smooth support enabling van der Heyden to render the globe's cartographic surface and the books' material variety at very fine detail. The composition is lit from a consistent single source that creates soft cast shadows among the objects, establishing depth within the tight still-life arrangement. Book pages, visible where volumes are open or fanned, are rendered with the slightly warm tone of aged paper.