Steenwijck brings to the vanitas a genre in which he specialised, according to the surviving inventories -the compositional structure, scheme, colour range and lighting characteristic of the so-called monochrome banketjes or monochrome still lifes of Willem Claesz. Heda (P2754, P2655 and P2756) and Pieter Claesz. (P2753). Accordingly, the objects are arranged on a simple wooden table that is half covered by a tablecloth and located in the immediate foreground. There, they are silhouetted against a neutral background and illuminated by a powerful beam of light that runs diagonally from left to right. The paint, applied using smooth, homogenous brushstrokes, is restricted to a range of browns and yellows, broken only by the white of the parchment. It should be stressed in this connection that this is one of the very few vanitas paintings to include among the objects featured a travel bag, which, as Bergström points out (1983), alludes clearly to life as a journey. Bergström reports three copies of this still life with variations: one by Hendrick Schook (1669-1696), a painter active in Utrecht (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum); another in the sale of the Christian Langaards collection, Oslo, 1925; and a third on the Swedish art market around 1938.

Posada Kubissa, Teresa, Pintura holandesa en el Museo Nacional del Prado. Catálogo razonado, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009, p.134-135