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Guy Colwell

Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch

On sale date: August 13, 2024

An obsessive painter, working away for years in near secrecy, now reveals a magnum opus to the world — author and subject, intertwined.

In Guy Colwell's first full graphic novel in 33 years, we see one painter, Colwell himself, consider another, Hieronymus Bosch, and the story behind the latter's most notable work told in sequential panels. The known details of Bosch's life, and the commissioning of his enormous triptych "The Garden Of Earthly Delights," are scant. Colwell takes the facts of Bosch's time and setting and constructs a tale of a man and artist torn equally among piety, creativity, and commerce.

In Colwell's version of Jheronimus van Aken (Bosch's real name), he is an artist paid well by local dukes to paint a vision of the world before the fall, but will the religious leaders of his village see it as celebrating God's creation, or fatally corrupted by sensuality? And what of the increasing numbers of young models needed to depict pre-apple innocence?

This imaginatively conceived historical graphic novel is Colwell's crowning achievement in a cartooning career, begun in the underground comix movement of the 1970s, and marked by risk-taking and political engagement. His drawing, rendering, and storytelling has never been as self-assured as in Delights.

Praise

"Painter and underground cartoonist Colwell turns the commissioning of The Garden of Earthly Delights in late 15th-century Netherlands into an epochal struggle between faith and doubt, superstition and reason. ... a thought-provoking venture into a time when art had life-or-death consequences." — Publishers Weekly

"An enlightening consideration of Bosch facing torments not far removed what's depicted in his painting. Colwell depicts an anguished craftsman being prodded beyond his comfort zone to create a work of genius, and his informed interpretation has a strength of its own." — The Slings & Arrows

"It's hard to think of a better pairing between artist and subject than Guy Colwell's new book, Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch. ... If this book is the capstone to his on-and-off-again comics career, it's a fitting one." — Canon Zine

Specs

Pages
168
Format
Hardback
Color
Black-and-white.
Dimensions
8.3" × 11.1"
ISBN-13
9781683969525
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