FREE

Join us for these special 20-30 minute talks and if you stay for lunch at Oscar’s, they’ll even throw in dessert!

Among the Museum's treasures is Carstian Luyckx's lovely, mysterious vanitas Allegory of Charles I and Henrietta of France in a Vanitas. Michael Mendle, Professor of History at the University of Alabama, shares his long love affair with this work, which to us is both alluring and remote. Who were the people in the painting? Why put them in a vanitas, a genre signifying the impermanence of earthly life? And, finally, how did the canvas take stock elements and combine them into a profoundly personal reflection upon the artist's own life and place?