Bootvaart (Boat Trip)

A long canoe glides over glassy water carrying a troupe of carnival types, perfectly mirrored in the surface below. It revives one of the oldest images in European art, the ship of fools. Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff of 1494 was one of the first real bestsellers of the printing age, and Bosch painted his own boatload of revellers around 1500, all drifting nowhere while the world's follies sail on. Wiedijk loads his boat with the same human cargo, the crowned drummer, the herald with his parrot (the bird that repeats without understanding), the chef-king under a parasol hung with clocks. Those clocks are the tell: a feast with time ticking over it, pleasure that refuses to check the hour. And the mirror-still water doubles the whole parade, so the fools sail above their own reflection, twice as many and going nowhere twice as fast. We are all aboard, costumed and content, on a boat with no destination.