Close Looking: Allegory of Avarice (a Fancy Word for Greed)

Why It Matters

The piece exemplifies how early modern Dutch artists combined naturalistic observation with symbolic storytelling to convey moral lessons; its enduring imagery offers a concise visual prompt to consider personal and societal greed. For museums and scholars, it underscores the power of small-scale works to communicate complex ethical ideas across centuries.

Summary

Stephanie Schrader, Curator of Drawings at the Getty, discusses Jacques de Gheyn’s circa-1608 drawing Allegory of Avarice, a compact five-by-seven inch work that blends life observation with imaginative exaggeration. De Gheyn renders an unattractive, anthropomorphic frog—elongated limbs, a humped back, claw-like hand clutching coins and a globe—to symbolize greed, using dark brown ink and precise hatching to create texture and three-dimensionality. Schrader highlights the artist’s skill in drawing from life and imagination, noting how minute details (the beady eye, attenuated leg, and hatched sphere) amplify the allegorical message. She argues the image’s moral critique of avarice resonated with 17th-century Dutch viewers and retains relevance for contemporary reflection on selfish behavior.

Original Description

How can an ugly frog send a timeless warning? Join curator Stephanie Schrader as she shares a favorite drawing and the lesson she still finds relevant today.

Join Drawings Curator Stephanie Schrader as she shares one of her favorite works of art, a 17th century pen and ink drawing of a small frog. By adding coins, a hump on the frog’s back, and a human-like claw grasping a globe, the artist drew another meaning into this work. Schrader reveals what the artist was trying to say through the symbols in the drawing, and how that lesson remains as powerful today as the day it was made.

Video includes subtitles/closed captions in English and Spanish.

Discover more about the artwork: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/1095RZ

Learn more about the related exhibition, Virtue and Vice: Allegory in European Drawing: https://www.getty.edu/exhibitions/virtue-vice/

This video is part of Getty’s ongoing series Close Looking: A behind-the-scenes look at Getty’s most loved works of art. Watch more of Close Looking videos here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLij2XTFgmBSSU8mi1BJI_7swzeqnOMNA-

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