Jheronimus Bosch

Spell his name however you want -- and I've tried about half a dozen ways -- he's pretty interesting. Den Bosch has a great museum dedicated to his work:  Jheronimus Bosch Art Center. 

I'd never taken a really close look at his paintings before, just had the general impression that they were pretty weird.  Well, a close-up look confirms it: they are (and by extension he probably was) not just pretty weird, but actually extremely weird.

Here's the Bosch enigma to me.  He had an incredibly broad and prolific imagination, but spent his life working only within one consistent and narrow theme.

Everyone agrees Bosch was a terrific draftsman, but after that opinions vary wildly.  Was he a simple commercial craftsman who discovered something that sold and stuck with it?  Was he obsessed with spreading the word and reinforcing Christian dogma regarding the wages of sin?  Was he a closet subversive, undermining that dogma via over-the-top lampooning of the theme? His work is strange enough that the wildest interpretation of motivation is probably tame by comparison.  And that he painted these in the 15th century... hard to believe.

A look at a couple close ups of painting details:

Binnendieze

An excellent, and mainly underground, boat tour of what was until very recently the sewer system of the town.  From Wikipedia on Den Bosch: 


"Hidden below the old city is a canal network called the Binnendieze that once spanned 22 km (14 mi). It started out as a regular river, the Dommel, running through the city in medieval times but due to lack of space in the city, people started building their houses and roads over the river. In later times it functioned as a sewer and fell into disrepair. In recent decades, the remaining sixth of the old waterway system has been renovated..."

I'm certain Ed Norton and his lodge mates of The Loyal Order of Racoons would have saluted the tour with a shake of the tail!

Art Carney as Ed Norton

Loyal Order of Racoons say "Great Tour!"