Is this “Owl’s Nest” the Hieronymus Bosch’s self-portrait that we desire?

In our recent review about the exhibition ‘The Shell’ at Almine Rech Gallery, we stressed the importance of art as a starting point for subjective narrations or exercise of creativity by an attentive and emancipated viewer. If in the case of The Shell these were encouraged by a spectacle of painting plethora, blending of histories, references, contexts, aesthetics, we cannot find a better example than the The Owl’s Nest by Hieronymus Bosch to prove that narrations can as well be prompted by a single, small, isolated drawing, especially when the facts about it have completely disappeared in the maze of the past.

 

We recently had the chance to see The Owl’s Nest at Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. The context was an exhibition of about 150 works from the museum’s drawing collections that was firstly set up in Paris and, after a three-tranche installation at “home” at the Dutch institution, will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2017.

 

What first strikes about this drawing is its formal quality: the fluency of the pen marks, the textures of the tree bark, leaves, spiderwebs, bird feathers, the disappearing contrast between light and shadow, the soft signs of the background landscape, the balance of the overall composition. Everything is rendered with great mastery to achieve a realistic depiction of a nature scene the artist might have seen with his very eyes during one of his walks. This accuracy to life in both the subject and the way it’s drawn is already the first question mark about the The Owl’s Nest, since what Bosch has gotten us used to in his paintings and other drawings is the fantastic even when this is more strictly related to religious iconography and iconology. Why did the old master who many have called the precursor of surrealism draw such a lifelike scene?

 

Theories have it that this drawing could be a simple preparatory sketch for a painting. But having considered all Bosch’s studies that have survived until today and how these can be matched to what we also see in his works on wood, we can say The Owl’s Nest has a very different feeling to it and no direct reference to this particular subject and the way it is composed in the drawing can be found in any painting. Besides, its degree of completion is great enough to consider it as an independent piece. Did Bosch really intend it as such?

 

Looking for answers about what might have pushed the artist to make it, scholars have investigated into the iconological meanings of The Owl’s Nest, saying for example that this scene might derive from fables popular around the same time as the execution (late 15th century/early 16th century), in which the owl, a bird living at night and therefore symbol of sin, is being attacked by daily and virtuous birds. Another interpretation, which we find very fascinating, is based on the recurrence of the owl in most of Bosch’s works and the relation with wood, which in Dutch translated bos – the artist’s family name derived from his hometown. According to this theory, the owl is nothing but a self portrait or signature of the artist. Is The Owl’s Nest then the most accurate and natural image we have of how the artist saw himself?

 

In addition to all the uncertainty around the meaning, the unclear purpose and style discrepancy in the artist’s practice, the mystery of The Owl’s Nest deepens even further because of its history: it is unknown who possessed the drawing and where it was kept between the moment when it left Bosch’s atelier and 1930, when banker Franz W. Koenigs acquired it. The unknown collector(s) might also be responsible for the current sheet cropping and the black cadre lines around it.

 

Even though all this quest for truths regarding a simple drawing seems hopeless and frustrating, such openness should at the same time be regarded as a fertile ground for inventive and revolutionary speculations by contemporary storytellers.

November 25, 2020