The peddler

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The peddler (Hieronymus Bosch)
The peddler
Hieronymus Bosch , around 1500
Oil on wood
71.0 x 70.6 cm
Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum , Rotterdam

The peddler is a painting by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch . It was created around 1500. Other names are The Wanderer , The Prodigal Son , The Landstreicher ( English The Wayfarer , The Pedlar ; Dutch De marskramer or De landloper ).

The picture, measuring 70.6 cm × 71 cm, was originally part of a triptych (outside), the central panel of which is missing and which also includes the allegory of gluttony and lust as well as the death of a curmudgeon and The Ship of Fools . It has been in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum , Rotterdam , since 1931 .

description

The picture shows in the center an already graying man in tattered, previously good clothing with an open knee and a poorly bandaged shin, who is generally regarded as a peddler , in front of a rural scene. He carries a box on his back with a spoon and a cat's skin attached to it, a long staff in his right hand and his hat in his left hand, which is stretched forward. On his belt he has a dagger and a filled purse. A pig's foot, a symbol of lower shoots, hangs from his smock. The man looks around, striding forward bent over. His gaze goes to a decaying house, which is often described as a brothel, and down to a yapping dog, which he keeps away with his staff.

Detail tavern

While the peddler dominates the center of the picture, the decaying house occupies the left part of the picture. In the doorway of the house a couple stands in a suggestive pose, a man urinates on the outside wall and an elderly woman looks out of a broken window. The roof of the house is damaged, a pub sign on the outside shows a white swan. Laundry hangs out of the hatch to dry.

To the right of the peddler you can see a beech tree with a dark crown and a well-maintained pasture gate, behind which a cattle looks up. In the background, sandy hills, green fields and individual houses are indicated, over which a gray-blue sky stretches. Various animals can be seen distributed throughout the picture, for example an owl in the tree looking at a great tit, magpies on the high pole in the distance, in the gate and in a cage by the house - with a bird cage hanging in front of the door as a landmark of that time Women's shelters were considered to be, to the left of the peddler the dog and a horde of pigs around a trough.

The painting was cut to a round picture , which has a diameter of about 71 cm. Today it is in an octagonal frame. As a result of the cut, some changes to the composition were made, the most noticeable being the reduction in size of the dog. It has no signature. The portrait is painted in a sandy tone, almost colorless and in finely graduated gray tones. The man's hat, bonnet, skirt and trousers as well as the tree trunk are all silver-gray, from which the earth-colored courtyard stands out. A deep shadow covers the center of the picture. Dendrochronological investigations showed that it could not have been painted before 1487, after the usual use of the wood from around 1493.

interpretation

Detail face

The painting experienced a changing history of interpretation in the 20th century. The first description by Gustav Glück (1904) and its interpretation as the prodigal son according to Luke 15 : 11–32 EU was initially formative , but later this was viewed by many authors as a misinterpretation. Glück saw the turning away of the man walking in torn clothes from the brothel and his remorseful turning to his father's pasture, as well as the horde of pigs as corresponding to the biblical story.

Over time, interpretations of the man as a tramp / vagabond were published, as well as attempts to see the representation in the context of an astrological program. The hypothesis that the peddler was a self-portrait of Bosch was first put forward by Dirk Hannema in 1931, but there is no historical evidence for it.

Like the overall picture, the individual picture details were the subject of different interpretations and assumptions about their symbolic content.

From the middle of the 20th century, interpretations gained acceptance that the panel “is based on an idea, an abstraction”. It shows a homeless peddler as someone who has given up his earlier dubious behavior. The peddler walks through the picture from the left, from whose hustle and bustle he turns thoughtfully, and which appears evil and vicious to him, to the right to the gate and thus to the "good side" towards the gate to the cattle, which was considered a sacrificial animal in the history of symbols, and thus promises redemption. In the picture it becomes clear that “Bosch did not depict a specific pilgrim, but the person himself, who is given a short time here on earth, who in his ignorance leads a sinful life and thinks about it.” Reference is made to that at that time leitmotif theme of the human pilgrimage of homo viator , which was a metaphor for life in the Middle Ages. Jan Koldeweij sees the image shaped by the ideas of the Devotio moderna , which "urged every believer to experience Christianity personally and to fill it in through the individual following of Christ ".

The hay cart , outside

The peddler corresponds to a very similar representation on the outer wings of the triptych The Hay Wagon , the background of which, however, is designed differently, but pursues the same intention, namely to encourage the viewer to reconsider his own lifestyle.

Provenance

Auction of the picture at Cassirer in Berlin on 29./30. September 1930 (newspaper clipping)

The picture was in the possession of the Austrian banker and art collector Albert Figdor in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century and was first described in detail by Gustav Glück in 1904 . It had been acquired in the Parisian art trade a few years earlier. In 1930 it was sold to the Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker at auction of the Figdor Collection , who sold it to the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 1931, where it is still located today.

literature

  • Roger H. Marijhnen: Hieronymus Bosch - The complete work. Mercartorfonds Antwerpen / Parkland Verlag Köln, 1999, ISBN 3-88059-971-8 , pp. 410-419.
  • Jan Koldeweij, Bernhard Vermet, Paul Vandenbroeck: Hieronymus Bosch - The Complete Works . Catalog for the exhibition “Jheronimus Bosch” in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2001, Verlag Belser, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 978-3-7630-2563-3 , pages 28 (ill.), 62, 78, 88, 95 and 183 -186.

Web links

Commons : The Peddler  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c De marskramer on the website of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
  2. ↑ a b c Bernhard Vermet: Hieronymus Bosch: painter, workshop or style? In: Hieronymus Bosch - The Complete Works. Catalog for the exhibition “Jheronimus Bosch” in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2001, Verlag Belser, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 978-3-7630-2563-3 , p. 88.
  3. ^ A b Paul Vandenbroeck: Heronymus Bosch: Des Rätsels Weisheit. In: Hieronymus Bosch - The Complete Works. Catalog for the exhibition "Jheronimus Bosch" in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2001, Verlag Belser, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 978-3-7630-2563-3 , p. 183.
  4. ↑ a b c d Wilhelm Fraenger : Hieronymus Bosch . Verlag der Kunst Dresden 1975, pp. 258, 259
  5. ^ Roger H. Marijnisse: Hieronymus Bosch - The complete work. Mercartorfonds Antwerpen / Parkland Verlag Köln, 1999, ISBN 3-88059-971-8 , p. 413.
  6. ^ A b c Wilhelm Fraenger : Hieronymus Bosch . Verlag der Kunst Dresden 1975, p. 260
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g Roger H. Marijektiven: Hieronymus Bosch - The complete work. Mercartorfonds Antwerpen / Parkland Verlag Köln, 1999, ISBN 3-88059-971-8 , p. 410.
  8. ↑ Bernhard Vermet: Hieronymus Bosch: painter, workshop or style? In: Hieronymus Bosch - The Complete Works. Catalog for the exhibition “Jheronimus Bosch” in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2001, Verlag Belser, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 978-3-7630-2563-3 , p. 95.
  9. ↑ on pigmentation see also: Color analysis of the image on colourlex.com , accessed on July 17, 2016.
  10. ^ A b c Roger H. Marijnisse: Hieronymus Bosch - The complete work. Mercartorfonds Antwerpen / Parkland Verlag Köln, 1999, ISBN 3-88059-971-8 , p. 411/412.
  11. ↑ Elizabeth Sudeck: beggars representations from the end of the XV. Century up to Rembradt. Strasbourg 1931, quoted from Marijektiven (1999), p. 410.
  12. ↑ Stefan Fischer: The maze of pictures . The world of HB Callwey, Munich 2016, p. 181 .
  13. ^ Roger H. Marijnisse: Hieronymus Bosch - The complete work. Mercartorfonds Antwerpen / Parkland Verlag Köln, 1999, ISBN 3-88059-971-8 , p. 415.
  14. ↑ Jan Koldeweij: Hieronymus Bosch in his city 's-Hertogenbosch In: Hieronymus Bosch - Das Gesamtwerk. Catalog for the exhibition “Jheronimus Bosch” in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2001, Verlag Belser, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 978-3-7630-2563-3 , p. 62.
  15. ↑ Lotte Brand Philip: The "Pedlar" by Hieronymus Bosch, a study in detection , Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 9/1958, pp. 1–81 - quoted from Marijnisse (1999), p. 410.