Amazon eBay: THE IDENTITY OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH'S WAYFARER
The Identity of Hieronymus
Bosch's Wayfarer
Philip Leider
Department of Art History, University of California, Irvine
Perhaps no single figure in all of Hieronymus Bosch’s work has elicited a
more chaotic array of interpretations than the so-called Wayfarer (ca.1510) and
the almost identical figure on the outer panels of the famous triptych, The
Haywain, painted about ten years earlier.1 The iconographical problems posed
are the most basic. Who is he? What is he meant to represent? Is his position on
the outside panels of the Haywain significant to the narrative of that work, and,
if so, in what way? An explanation that seems to provide a more complete answer
Fig. 1: Hieronymus Bosch, The Wayfarer, ca.
1510. Boymans-van Beuninger
Museum, Rotterdam.
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PHILIP LEIDER
than any so far advanced is that the figure is a
representation of the Eternal (or Wandering)
Jew.
The legend of the Wandering Jew is quickly
told. According to it, a certain Cartaphilus was
present as Jesus passed, carrying his cross to
Calvary:
Cartaphilus passed by him, hit him
and told him to go more quickly.
Thereupon Jesus said to him, “I am
going, and you shall wait until I
return.” Cartaphilus became a
Christian, was baptised in the name
of Jesus, and by returning to his then
age of thirty every hundred years,
kept living as a pious witness to the
passion of Christ, hoping for his
redemption at the end of the world.2
(Figs. 5, 6)
Histories of the Eternal Jew recite a seemingly
endless number of variations on this tale, along
with various “sightings” of the Wandering Jew.
One of the best-known is the account of Paulus
von Eitzen, bishop of Schleswig, who “saw”
the figure praying in a Hamburg church in the
winter of 1542. He is described as
…a tall man, dressed in threadbare
garments, with long hair, standing
barefoot in the chancel; whenever
the name of Jesus was pronounced
he bowed his head, beat his breast
and sighed profoundly. It was
reported that he was a shoemaker
named Ahasuerus who had cursed
Jesus on the way to the crucifixion.
On further questioning he related
the historical events that had
Fig. 2: Caricature of a Jew,
Kikeriki, Vienna, ca. 1900
(after Schreckenberg
1996:327).
Fig. 3: Hieronymus Bosch,
outer panels of The
Haywain, Prado
Museum, Madrid.
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THE IDENTITY OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH'S WAYFARER
occurred since. He conversed in the language of the country he
happened to be visiting.3
This version contains several of the most common attributes of the Wandering
Jew as the tale was elaborated over the centuries: the name Ahasuerus, the
poverty-stricken appearance, the wild hair, and the occupation of a shoemaker.
In his most basic form, he is reduced to a simple figure, striding along with his
walking stick as shown in figures 7 and 8, and, in more recent, overtly anti-
Semitic form, he is large-nosed (Fig. 9), carrying a money-bag (Fig. 10), or the
caricatured Jewish peddler, pursued by barking dogs (Fig. 2).
It seems hardly necessary to point out that anyone familiar with the overall
silhouette of the Wandering Jew must be struck by the similarity between it
and Bosch’s Wayfarer, striding along, driving a barking dog from his heels, his
“long hair” coming through a rent in his hat, “in threadbare garments,” his
shoemaker’s awl (Fig. 11) attached to the hat in his extended hand. In the tree
behind him an owl perches, symbolic of, among other things, blindness, in this
case the blindness of Jewry to the true faith. Featured more prominently in
the foreground than mere composition might account for is an animal casually
taken to be a cow, but which is more probably an ox, the ox being, among other
things, also a symbol of Jewry (stubbornness).4
Several scholars have found in the details of the landscapes of both the
Haywain panels and The Wayfarer elements that are linked to the astrological
symbolism of Saturn, the planetary body which presides over criminals,
beggars, cripples and those afflicted with acedia, sometimes translated as sloth
Fig. 4: The Haywain (open). Prado Museum, Madrid.
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