Ballonnen (Balloons)

A girl drifts above a bare beach blowing soap bubbles, surrounded by balloons, a frog and a kitten on balloons of their own, goldfish sealed in fairground bags. The bubble is the oldest vanitas emblem of all: the Roman writer Varro coined homo bulla, "man is a bubble," and Dutch printmakers spent centuries showing children blowing bubbles to make exactly that point. Wiedijk gives his dreaming child a whole sky of them, then sets her over a Dalí-bleached shore of driftwood numbered like a register of the dead. The result is the most fragile thing he ever painted: wonder caught at its peak, already starting to drift away.