Willem Claesz. Heda, an exponent of the monochrome banquet, was one of the leading seventeenth-century still-life painters. This picture shows smoking articles combined with a skull and an upturned römer. Smoking was regarded as the pre-eminent idle pastime. This seventeenth-century verse is singularly appropriate to this picture:

Het glas is leegh, De tijd is om,
De keers is uyt, De mens is stom
(The glass is empty, time has run out,
The candle is snuffed, Man is dumb.)