I like the idea that Bosch depicted himself as half hooded man, half crustacean monster in the bottom right hand corner of the altarpiece that he painted for the Brotherhood of Our Lady, the guild of which he himself was a ‘sworn brother’ in 1487 and hosted its annual banquet in the summer of 1488.   It shows exactly the sort of respectable, bespectacled, thoughtful and earnest man one would expect him to have been as recorded by the church archives, but whose mind was nevertheless teeming with half crazy and fantastic visions of paradise and hell, populated by sarcastic images of his fellow citizens, the evidence for which is in the pictures themselves.

It wasn’t straightforward to get to s’Hertogenbosch by 8 o’clock in the morning in time for the opening of the Bosch exhibition, where there was already a long queue of international art pilgrims.   I’m glad I made it because it’s not a very easy exhibition to absorb, given how relatively few fully authenticated surviving works there are, mixed with copies and works by followers.   I found I particularly enjoyed the assembly of nearly the complete oeuvre of his surviving drawings which are so much less familiar and where it is easier to understand his curious mixture of late medieval storybook piety and coarse scatological humour and to enjoy the free fluency of his invention of fictive monsters.   What comes across is the strange intensity, as well as playfulness, of the imaginative life of an otherwise entirely conventional craft painter living and working just next to the marketplace in a regional town in northern Brabant, far away from his painter contemporaries.