Allegory

This is one of the few allegories Dujardin painted. It shows a lifesize young boy in a blue tunic, blowing bubbles. The painting has long been known as an allegory of the vanity of human life. From the sixteenth century on, a small boy blowing bubbles symbolised the brevity of life. The purely allegorical ‘homo bulla’ (man as a bubble) of the sixteenth century was later transformed in Dutch genre painting into an ordinary boy blowing bubbles.