One of the foremost painters of still lifes in seventeenth-century Holland, David Bailly spent much of his career in Leiden, a city not normally associated with the genre. In this painting, he unites a number of vanitas elements—a fading flower, an hourglass, tobacco used to produce ephemeral smoke—to create a simple composition with numerous reminders of the transience of life. This is one of only a handful of surviving still lifes by his hand, but it demonstrates his sensitivity in rendering various materials and his playfulness in composing still lifes.