The Extraction of the Stone of Folly

The support consists of two vertical oak planks (14.3 and 16.3 cm), 0.5-0.6 cm thick. The panel is bevelled on all sides. Cloth, probably linen, has been glued to the back. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1535. The panel could have been ready for use by 1546, but a date in or after 1560 is more likely. The white ground was applied up to the edges of the panel. Underdrawing is not visible to the naked eye, but infrared reflectography revealed a schematic underdrawing of contour lines in a liquid medium in the tondo. It is particularly pronounced in the pink robes. There are also several contour lines in the landscape. The underdrawn birdcage at the left of the building fig. e was not executed in the paint layer. The motifs around the tondo were painted in a sketchy manner in brown and white paint on top of a yellowish paint layer. The tondo itself was painted with greater detail. The figures were reserved, while smaller elements such as the objects on the table were not.

Fair. The paint layers are slightly abraded and there are discoloured retouchings along the join. The varnish is thick and somewhat discoloured.

...; German sale;¹¹According to a clipping from an unidentified sale catalogue on the reverse. ? London;²²Note RMA. …; from the restorer W.A. Hopman (1828-1910), Amsterdam, fl. 530, as Jheronimus Bosch, to the museum, October 1893; on loan to the Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch, since July 2003

ObjectNumber: SK-A-1601

The central scene in this painting is based on what may be an autograph version by Bosch of the subject of The Extraction of the Stone of Folly in Madrid with the inscription ‘Meester snijt de keye ras // Mijne name is lubbert das’ (Master, cut the stone out quickly. My name is Lubbert Das ‘Doltish Ninny’) (fig. a).¹⁶¹⁶At the beginning of the 16th century this painting was probably owned by Bishop Philip of Burgundy (d. 1524) in his castle at Duurstede. After 1794 it entered the Escorial with the collection of the Duke of Arco; see most recently Koldeweij 1991, pp. 6-11; Silver 2006, pp. 155-58. Some specialists doubt the autograph nature of the Madrid painting, among them Brand Philip 1958, p. 45, and Unverfehrt 1980, pp. 111-14, 263-64, no. 55. This opinion is shared by Lammertse in Rotterdam 2015, pp. 67-68 and Ilsink et al. 2016, pp. 464-67, no. 33, but contested by Silva Maroto in Madrid 2016, pp. 356-63, no. 51.

The theme of The Extraction of the Stone recurs several times in the painting and literature of the Low Countries in the 16th and 17th centuries. It concerns the removal of an imaginary stone from the head of a foolish person, someone who has ‘rocks in his head’ or has been ‘injured by the stone’. The idea that one could remove ‘the stone of folly’ from someone’s head with a surgical operation was already being regarded as quackery in the 16th century.¹⁷¹⁷See Bax 1949, pp. 205-09; Marijnissen 1987, p. 441. The Madrid scene differs so much from the one in Amsterdam that the latter cannot be a free copy but is a later imitation in Bosch’s style. The quack is literally removing a stone from the head of the man seated in the chair. Various curious onlookers are grouped around the table on the right and are inspecting an extracted stone held by one of them. It is only the surgeon and his patient who display some kind of resemblance to their counterparts in Madrid, in which there are only four figures situated in a broad landscape. Several important attributes are also missing in the Amsterdam painting, such as the tulip sprouting from the patient’s head, the inverted funnel on the surgeon’s head, and the book balancing on the nun’s head. These are all metaphors of folly, and identify the surgeon as a quack. In the Amsterdam version there is a wall behind the group of figures with a circular niche in which an owl is perched. An owl generally has a negative connotation with Bosch, standing for bad and foolish people who fear the light.¹⁸¹⁸Vandenbroeck 1989, p. 72; Bax 1949, pp. 158-62. One detail that may be an allusion to fraud is the figure having a cloth tied around his head, who may have just been operated on, for in the 16th century ‘binding someone’s head’ meant to deceive them; see Bax 1949, p. 206.

Surrounding the central circular scene are grotesque figures in grisaille. Flying around in the top left corner is a creature with a naked human body and long, pointed wings. This is a devil of the kind seen in The Last Judgement fragment in Munich, which is attributed to Bosch, where it spews out liquid excrement over a sinner. The devil in the Amsterdam painting is discharging a similar ‘wet fart’.¹⁹¹⁹Bax 1962, p. 36. Seated on this flying figure is a second devil of a type found quite often in works by Bosch and his followers.²⁰²⁰Such as the panel with Hell in Rotterdam; illustrated in ENP V, 1969, no. 64, pl. 42. In the top right corner is a large fish devouring a small one, together with a sort of sea-lion. In the bottom left corner there is a kneeling man whose upper body has turned into a house, which was inspired by the huge devil on the left wing of the Triptych with the Temptation of St Antony in Lisbon.²¹²¹Ilsink et al. 2016, pp. 140-59, no. 4; illustrated in ENP V, 1969, no. 90, pl. 77; see Bax 1962, p. 39. Beside this figure is a small banner with a ‘B’ on it, a second ‘sea-lion’, a globe with protrusions, and a woman pinned down by a tree. According to Brand Philip, these Boschian motifs on the frame of the tondo represent the element Air. She associates this version of The Extraction of the Stone of Folly with another circular copy of The Conjurer after Jheronimus Bosch which has a similar painted frame with Boschian motifs (fig. b).²²²²For this copy see Unverfehrt 1980, pp. 115, 248, no. 21a. According to her, the motifs on that frame stand for the element Water, and she suggests that those two paintings, together with The Pedlar in Rotterdam²³²³Ilsink et al. 2016, pp. 316-35, no. 19. and a lost scene of The Hog Hunt, were once part of the outside of a large triptych with four children of planets in four tondos (fig. c).²⁴²⁴See Brand Philip 1958, pp. 41-67, esp. pp. 63-67, fig. 44; see Bax 1962 for a rejection of this theory.

There are five variants of the Amsterdam version of The Extraction of the Stone of Folly. The tondo is almost identical in all of them, but only one has the frame with grisailles (fig. d), while the remainder consists of the tondo alone.²⁵²⁵Unverfehrt 1980, p. 264, no. 55a. One notable difference between the Amsterdam painting and other versions is the absence of the bird in a cage on the wall behind the standing quack. Infrared reflectography shows that the birdcage was indeed prepared in the underdrawing (fig. e) but omitted in the picture surface.

Although the painting was regarded as an original Jheronimus Bosch when it was bought in the late 19th century, Friedländer suggested in 1927 that it was a copy, possibly made by the Antwerp painter Marcellus Coffermans around 1550.²⁶²⁶Friedländer V, 1927, p. 153, no. 109a. He was on the right track. It seems likely that the Rijksmuseum version of The Extraction of the Stone of Folly. (and the variants, (fig. d)) was made in the manner of Bosch in an Antwerp workshop in the second half of the 16th century, together with the closely related Conjurer, possibly as pendants. In technique, style and palette, they are far removed from the work of Bosch himself.

J. Bogers, 2010
Literature updated by J.P. Filedt Kok, 2016

Lafond 1914, p. 76 (as Bosch); Friedländer V, 1927, p. 153, no. 109a (as possibly Marcellus Coffermans, c. 1550); Baldass 1943, p. 231, no. 2 (as school of Bosch); Bax 1945, p. 123; Bax 1949, pp. 75, 205-06; Brand Philip 1958, pp. 41-53; Bax 1962, p. 38; De Tolnay 1965, p. 427, no. 1; ’s-Hertogenbosch 1967, p. 127, no. 31; Gerlach 1968, p. 381; ENP V, 1969, p. 88, no. 109a; Unverfehrt 1980, pp. 111-14, 264, no. 55a; Koldeweij 1991, pp. 8-9; De Vrij 2012, p. 596, no. E.61; Philipp in Hamburg 2016, pp. 102-03

1903, p. 59, no. 587 (as Bosch); 1976, p. 135, no. A 1601 (as school of Bosch)

J. Bogers, 2010, 'manner of Jheronimus Bosch, The Extraction of the Stone of Folly, c. 1550 - c. 1600', in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6187