ABSTRACT
Ged Quinn’s painting Hegel’s Happy End is a nod to the vanitas style of early-seventeenth-century Dutch painting, as the artist explicitly mentions in an interview, but as is also apparent from the group of paintings to which this one belongs. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines a vanitas painting as one that “contains collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly pleasures”. Hegel sees art as attempting to express through a different medium, the sensuous and material rather than the conceptual, the same thing that philosophy aims to express: the ultimate understanding of reality and ourselves. Vibrant, colourful flowers take up most of the painting, suggesting what the main topic might be: nature. The flowers in the painting can be seen as signifying this practical approach humans often have towards nature.
