Le Vagabond

A lone pedlar walks through a landscape, with a house on one side and a gate on the other. Hieronymus Bosch leaves us to decide which way his story turns.

The story behind the painting

Hieronymus Bosch, born Jheronimus van Aken around 1450, spent his whole life in the Brabant town of 's-Hertogenbosch and died in 1516. The Wayfarer, also called The Pedlar, was painted in oil on panel around 1500. It is not a complete work but a fragment: it once belonged to a triptych or diptych that is now partly lost. Other surviving pieces of the same ensemble are the Allegory of Gluttony and Lust, the Ship of Fools, and Death and the Miser, now scattered among different collections.

What to look for

The painting is round, about 71.5 cm across, a shape that frames the traveller like a scene seen through a lens. A lone man, the pedlar of the alternative title, walks through the landscape with his load. Behind him on the left stands a house associated with debauchery; to the right is a gate. The figure closely resembles the wanderer Bosch painted in The Path of Life on the outside of The Haywain Triptych, so the two images can be read as relatives in Bosch's thinking.

Meaning and intent

What is the traveller doing? Interpretations differ. One reading sees him choosing between the path of virtue, marked by the gate on the right, and the path of debauchery in the house on the left. Another sees him as the prodigal son of the parable, returning home from the world. Both readings make the picture a meditation on choice and on the road of a human life, with the viewer invited to stand at the same crossroads and ask which way they would go.

Legacy

The panel is now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, which also holds Bosch's drawing The Owl's Nest; Wikidata also records it in the Jacques Goudstikker collection. Wikidata gives the size as 71 by 70.6 cm, close to the 71.5 cm diameter in Wikipedia. The figure has continued to inspire: the Australian painter Tim Storrier's self-portrait The Histrionic Wayfarer (after Bosch) won the Archibald Prize in 2012, five centuries after Bosch set his traveller on the road.