A Celestial Globe, a Banner, a Peach, an Hourglass, Books, Roses, a dead Snipe, a Bullfinch, a Great Tit, a Hazelnut and a Walnut on a Table

The objects in this still life were probably present in the artist's workshop, for they frequently reoccur in his few known pictures, for example those in the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, and in the Netherlandish Office for Fine Arts, The Hague (see O. Knuile, Seventeenth-century North Netherlandish Still Lifes, The Hague, 1985, pp. 170-1, no. VI-54). The open page of the manuscript bears a passage based on Psalm 62 which alludes to the idea of vanitas and bears the signature of the artist below. Wassenbergh suggests that the texts on the pictures by Schotanus might have been selected by his brother Christianus, who was a professor of Greek and Ecclesiastical History at the College in Franeke (see A. Wassenbergh, Petrus Schotanus, Vanitasschilder, Gens Schotana, 3 (1963), pp. 129-46).