Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Heraclitus
Hendrick ter Brugghen (ca. –1629)
1628
- Medium
- canvas, oil paint (paint)
- Classification
- painting
- Dimensions
- support: height 85.5 cm x width 70 cm
- Museum
- Rijksmuseum
- Credit line
- Gift of B. Asscher, Amsterdam and H. Koetser, Amsterdam
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
About this work
The Greek sage Heraclitus was known as the crying philosopher because he mourned the folly of mankind, while his opposite Democritus (the nearby pendant) could only laugh at it. Here Heraclitus looks like a melancholy old man. Downcast, he leans on a terrestrial globe and gestures dismissively with his left hand, as if to say: ‘All is for nought, the world will come to nothing.’
