Delights, pg. 116 (2023)

11x14

This is the first page from a three-page sequence in underground-era legend Guy Colwell’s recently published graphic novel Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch (Fantagraphics 2023).

Guy Colwell and I live in the same city so it was thrill to hear that he was doing a local talk and signing for his new book. I also was happy to see, from an original art collecting perspective, that Colwell was also offering select pages for sale. Colwell was a contemporary of Robert Crumb and other underground artists in the late 1960s and early ‘70s and, while not as prolific as his peers due to the demands of his primary career as a painter and fine artist, he has produced underground and alternative comic classics like Inner City Romance and Doll, among others.

His latest book is a somewhat fictionalized take on the 15th/16th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (Jheronimus van Aken) and the circumstances surrounding the creation of his most famous painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” which resides in the Museo del Prado in Spain. The three pages I added to my collection are a portion of a longer sequence depicting Bosch/van Aken being bedeviled by his imagination during the creation of the painting. The imagery shown reflects that of the original painting.