Skip to Main Content
Home>Plan Your Visit>Tours, Guides, and Maps>Self-Guided Tours>Audio Stop 202

Audio Stop 202

00:00 00:00
A naked man with ghostly white skin sits upright in a canopied bed set in a narrow room in this tall, vertical painting. Wearing a black cap, he looks to our left in profile toward a skeleton who comes through a door along the left edge of the composition. The man gestures at the skeleton with one hand and, with the other, toward a bag of money held up by a small demon next to the bed to our left. The skeleton wears a white shroud and holds an arrow. A winged angel kneels next to the man in the bed, one hand on the man’s shoulder and the other lifted to gesture at a crucifix hanging in the window over the door. A small devil on the canopy above looks down onto the bed. At the foot of the bed, a man wearing a green robe and headdress drops coins into a sack held by another demon. Three more demons crawl about and hide under the chest. Pieces of armor and weapons lie on the ground to the right in front of a stone ledge in the foreground. Two pieces of clothing drape over the ledge to our left.

Hieronymus Bosch

Death and the Miser, c. 1485/1490

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 41

Filmmaker Jem Cohen and National Gallery of Art director Kaywin Feldman discuss the intrigue and timelessness of Bosch’s powerful painting.

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:
This unsettling scene by Hieronymous Bosch presents us with a classic cautionary tale. Kaywin Feldman, Director of the National Gallery of Art.

KAYWIN FELDMAN:
In the story, we see that as death approaches the miser, in fact I sort of see death peering around the door as a kind of macabre room service, and he is reminding the miser that his time has come, and the little demons are offering the bags of money, and meanwhile the angel is looking up towards the crucifix and encouraging the miser to think of God and, to give up sinful ways.  

NARRATOR:
The figure in green represents the miser earlier in life. He greedily counts gold coins while a nearby rat clutches a money-lending document.

Filmmaker Jem Cohen:

JEM COHEN:
What would be a flashback in the cinema can be simultaneous in a painting - a different moment from the same story placed elsewhere in the picture so the viewer cuts from one to the other. Here, the demon’s already inside the chest taking possession of that which can't be possessed, or not for long, by mortal humans - which is to say, riches. So this is a ‘you can't take it with you’ painting from a very different era that remains bitterly relevant today. Today those sacks might be full of stocks and bonds or Bitcoin, but greed is greed and hoarding is hoarding, so it's very timeless.  

NARRATOR:
Bosch’s signature monsters are everywhere - they’re incredibly inventive.

JEM COHEN:
The demon under the curtain looks just like the Creature from the Black Lagoon - a testament to Bosch’s resonance in popular culture.

KAYWIN FELDMAN:
There’s an angel seated behind the miser and has one hand in fact on the miser’s shoulder, and the angel is pointing up towards the window where there’s a crucifix and light descending, and it’s a moment for the miser to reconsider and mend his ways.

NARRATOR:
There is much we still don’t know about Bosch’s painting. It may have been part of an altarpiece that presented a fuller narrative of the struggle between good and evil - we are left with many unanswered questions. Infra-red imaging revealed that Bosch too was unsure how this story would end.

KAYWIN FELDMAN:
Originally, Bosch painted the miser grasping the bag of coins that the little monster is offering him, and in his other hand he had some silver chalices, and you can see in this final version that Bosch changed his mind. So, we’re not really quite sure what direction the miser is going to go.

What’s particularly timeless I think about Bosch is that he holds a mirror up and shows humanity what it looks like.  And to his credit, that mirror is just as relevant, funny and piercing today as it was 500 years ago when he painted the picture.  

West Building Tour: Featured Selections