To mark the 500th anniversary of Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch in 2016, Het Noordbrabants Museum and the TextielMuseum brought The Elephant back to the Netherlands, reinterpreted by artist Jan Fabre as a contemporary tapestry and table linen.
In around 1530, a remarkable series of five tapestries based on the paintings by Bosch (ca. 1450-1516) was woven in Brussels. Only an incomplete series still remains in the collection of El Escorial in Spain; The Elephant is missing. However, the tapestry’s depiction of a besieged elephant is well known. In 2016, seven major museums in the province of Brabant presented a contemporary exhibition programme to coincide with ‘Hieronymus Bosch – Visions of a Genius’ (13 February to 8 May 2016) in Het Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch.
Fabre designed a contemporary interpretation of The Elephant, which was later translated into table linen. The design of the table linen is not the same as the tapestry. The motif of the elephant is repeated but surrounded by a number of Fabre’s ‘drawings’ of a boar, a man with a spike through his head, a duck’s leg, towers, ladders, a shield showing an anchor and several small leaf ornaments. The following text – which was adapted from the inscription on one of Bosch’s paintings and rhymes in the original Dutch – is woven into the border: ‘Master, rid me of this stone soon / My name is Jan Fabre.’ The tablecloths were woven in three different sizes and the motifs given a different prominence in each one.
Fabre (1958) is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist, playwright, stage director, choreographer and designer. He studied at the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Through his work, he has created a highly personal world with its own rules and laws as well as its own characters, symbols and recurring motifs. In 1990, he covered an entire building with ballpoint drawings (‘Tivoli’), one of his most famous works. In 2016, he created the controversial exhibition ‘Knight of Despair | Warrior of Beauty’ at The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
