Man in a Basket and Comic Figures by Hieronymus Bosch

A man crouches on a huge basket, lifting a lute above another figure’s exposed backside. Birds escape into the surrounding space, where small children run, reach and bend to catch them. At the left, a woman raises her hands beside a long pair of tongs. The drawing combines bodily absurdity with remarkably precise observations of movement: an impossible event becomes convincing through familiar gestures.

This is the Albertina’s two-sided sheet, inventory 7797, in Vienna. The museum calls the front Drolerien mit Mann im Korb, or Drolleries with a Man in a Basket, and dates it around 1500–1515. It currently attributes the drawing to Hieronymus Bosch, while recording an earlier workshop attribution. Names such as Beehive Scene and Beehive and Witches have also circulated, but they give a less exact account of what can actually be identified.^[1]

At a Glance

• ArtistHieronymus Bosch in the current Albertina record; attribution has been debated
• SubjectA man in a basket, a figure raising a lute, a woman with tongs and children chasing birds
• DateAround 1500–1515 in the museum record
• MediumPen and brown ink on paper; the reverse is catalogued as iron-gall ink
• Dimensions19.2 × 27 cm
• CollectionAlbertina, Vienna
• Inventory7797 recto and verso
• ReverseA more rapid basket scene and a monster supported on crutches

Annotated Details from The Albertina Beehive Sheet

These views bring together both faces of Albertina inventory 7797. The traditional title does not establish that every figure represents a witch.

Albertina Beehive Front

Albertina Beehive Reverse

Details from THE ALBERTINA BEEHIVE SHEET

Follow the numbered areas below. The faint reverse is shown without digitally strengthening its lines.

Albertina Beehive Front

1

The seated woman

The seated woman raises both arms beneath an angular cloth and long sticks. Her open mouth and the folds around her bent legs make this the most strongly characterised face on the sheet.

2

Figures at the beehive

The large woven form contains a bent figure while another crouches above it with a musical instrument. The close view separates their limbs from the repeated lines of the basket.

3

Small figures below

Small figures run, bend and leap along the bottom edge. Their scale and lightly drawn bodies differ sharply from the two larger inventions above.

Albertina Beehive Reverse

4

Figure within the woven form

Faint lines describe another figure enclosed within a large woven form. Repeated outlines leave the construction open rather than fixing one heavy contour.

5

The separate creature

A small, front-facing head rises above narrow limbs at the upper right. It stands apart from the larger arrangement on the left.

Image and detail crops: Wikimedia Commons source 1; Wikimedia Commons source 2 (public domain reproductions).

The Basket as a Stage

The large woven container dominates the front. Its open end faces towards the lower left, while its rounded body extends backwards to the right. Curving bands describe the wicker surface, giving it a volume quite different from the flat, unused paper around it. The basket is both an enclosure for one person and a platform for another. It turns an ordinary object into the structure that organises the scene.

The figure inside is almost entirely concealed. Legs, clothing and bare buttocks project from the opening, but the head remains hidden. That unequal exposure makes the action immediately uncomfortable as well as comic. We can see the vulnerable part of the body without seeing the person’s response. The container interrupts any straightforward reading of the figure as a complete individual moving freely through space.

Above, the crouching figure holds the lute by its neck. The instrument’s broad body rises over the shoulder, replacing the graceful pose of a musician with the preparation for a blow. Bent knees and feet gripping the basket establish a precarious balance. The action has not settled into a static emblem: the raised instrument and compressed posture make us anticipate what might happen next.

The Woman and the Tongs

The woman at the left supplies a different kind of movement. Her garment spreads over the ground, creating a broad base below the raised arms. Her face turns towards the basket, while the hands frame the space above her head. Compared with the crouching figure’s closed posture, her gesture opens outwards. It connects her to the spectacle without making her another part of the basket’s compressed mass.

The tongs complicate that gesture. Their long shafts run beside the lifted hands, but the fingers do not close naturally around them. The Albertina interprets the implement as a later addition within the drawing’s development.^[1] This small mismatch is useful evidence of invention. What initially reads as a single, finished action preserves an adjustment that changed the figure’s attributes without completely redrawing her hands.

The object should therefore remain tongs, rather than becoming a magical wand merely because an older title mentions witches. A woman holding a household implement does not by itself establish sorcery. Her age, headdress and expression are likewise insufficient to name a specific supernatural role. The image invites interpretation, but the description can begin with what the pen has actually placed on the paper.

Children Around the Edges

The small figures alter the drawing’s pace. Along the lower edge, one child stretches both arms towards a bird, another bends almost double, and others pull away from one another in lively pursuit. At the upper left, a reaching figure lifts an arm into a large patch of empty paper. The variety prevents the children from becoming a decorative border of repeated poses.

Their bodies are economical. A curved back, a bent knee or a short dark accent can suggest where weight falls. The spaces between limbs matter as much as the outlines themselves. An extended arm carries attention away from the torso; a lowered head draws it towards the ground. At this scale, a few strokes can make running, grasping and stooping distinguishable without elaborate facial detail.

The birds provide loose connections between these separate actions and the main scene. They occupy gaps where another large figure would have crowded the sheet. Yet the children’s smaller scale does not resolve into a consistent distance from the basket. The drawing gives us related inventions distributed across paper, rather than requiring every figure to inhabit one fully measurable setting.

That distinction changes how the page is explored. We can look first at the basket’s central spectacle, then follow a bird towards a reaching hand, and finally compare another child’s bent body. No single path explains every mark. The eye can move between groups in a way that resembles the artist’s accumulation of ideas, without reconstructing an undocumented order for each addition.

A Drawing That Remains Open to Change

The basket is described through repeated curved marks, while the woman’s clothes depend on longer folds and selected dark passages. The children require a lighter, more abbreviated handling. Those differences suit the various tasks performed by the pen: constructing a woven volume, arranging drapery or catching a fleeting pose. The sheet does not impose one uniform degree of finish on everything it contains.

The BRCP catalogue distinguishes two working phases whose inks have aged differently.^[4] Their present contrast helps make changes visible, but it does not establish a long interval between sessions or two named makers. Altered colour belongs partly to the materials’ history. It must be considered alongside the contours and gestures, rather than treated as a complete calendar of how the drawing was produced.

There is also no need to call the whole sheet a preparatory design for a known painting. Some motifs recur elsewhere, but the lively arrangement of large figures and small children has its own value. It lets the viewer observe ideas being varied, placed beside one another and developed to different degrees. Its changing degree of finish keeps those different acts of invention visible.

The More Rapid Version on the Back

The reverse revisits the basket with far fewer lines. Here a woman occupies its upper surface and raises an implement. The Albertina identifies it as a waffle iron; the BRCP description is less definite about the attributes.^[4][5] The basic relationship remains recognisable even where the marks are faint: one figure is confined below another who prepares to strike.

The reverse allows the viewer to compare another version of the same action. The container has enough outline to be understood without the detailed wicker pattern. A body and lifted arm establish the threatened blow without the front’s more sustained treatment. What is omitted becomes part of what makes the sketch revealing.

A separate monster appears to the right. Its human head connects to a rounded, swollen body, with small figures suggested inside and crutches below. The outline makes enclosure visible again, but now the container is a creature rather than a basket. Looking from one invention to the other reveals a shared visual problem: how something apparently closed can expose an unexpected human interior.

The museum’s 2022 catalogue text proposes that the rapid reverse came first and was developed more fully on the front.^[1] That is a plausible account of the different levels of elaboration. The labels recto and verso themselves, however, do not prove the sequence. Nor does a rougher drawing always have to precede a more detailed one. The proposal helps us examine the sheet without becoming an exact timetable.

Why Beehives and Witches Need Care

The familiar alternative titles can make the subject sound more settled than it is. The dominant form is visibly woven, and the Albertina calls it a hop basket. Nothing in the scene requires us to imagine a working hive full of bees. Likewise, the figures’ strange behaviour and implements do not establish that they belong to a specific gathering of witches.

The museum relates the imagery to carnival inversions and historical satire about women’s power over men, drawing on Erwin Pokorny’s interpretation.^[1] That framework concerns a misogynistic pictorial tradition, not a reliable account of women’s behaviour. Recognising such a convention allows it to be discussed critically. It does not require accepting its stereotypes or treating the drawing as evidence of an actual event.

Other associations have connected the birds and basket with drunkenness or greed. These proposals show how ordinary objects and language might have made the image more pointed for an early audience. They do not turn every bird into a fixed symbol with one meaning in all Bosch works. The comedy remains grounded in the depicted inversion: an instrument becomes a weapon, a container becomes a stage, and the body releases an improbable flock.

Bosch, His Workshop and the Attribution Debate

The Albertina’s current attribution is supported by the BRCP catalogue, but it has not gone unchallenged. Fritz Koreny assigned the sheet to the anonymous Master of the Prado Haywain, a proposed workshop artist. Larry Silver’s review of Koreny’s 2012 catalogue questioned that separation and compared the generous handling of ink here with Bosch’s accepted Berlin drawing The Wood Has Ears, the Field Has Eyes.^[6]

The disagreement concerns the assessment of particular strokes and comparisons, rather than a newly discovered signature proving one side correct. The name written at the lower right is identified by the Albertina as a later sixteenth-century inscription.^[1] It records an attribution in the sheet’s history. It should not be presented as Bosch signing and dating his own work.

The museum also disputes the case for a left-handed maker and points to the reverse’s curved contours as compatible with Bosch’s figure sketches.^[5] These are arguments that explain its present classification. Reporting them alongside Koreny’s alternative gives the reader a more accurate account than either concealing the disagreement or treating a debated workshop name as an established person.

Motifs That Travel Between Works

The basket motif has a close relative in the central panel of the Hermit Saints Triptych, where a figure’s body projects from a large container. The BRCP also connects the woman with tongs to the Louvre sheet traditionally called a model sheet with witches, and the birds escaping a body to the drawing of the Burning Ship.^[4] These comparisons establish a family of inventions without making the objects identical.

A repeated motif can be altered in scale, setting and function. On the Albertina sheet, the children and birds make the main group part of an open arrangement of comic activity. Within a painting, a related figure may occupy a small corner of a larger devotional narrative. Similarity alone cannot tell us which surviving version came first, or whether the drawing was made for that exact painted detail.

The sheet’s physical history places further limits on interpretation. The BRCP records a fold, a repaired gap and cropping on the reverse.^[4] Its present boundaries therefore do not guarantee that every original mark survives. Yet enough remains on both faces to preserve an unusually immediate encounter with drawn invention: a raised lute, an adjusted implement, children caught mid-gesture and a second version that tests how little a pen needs to make an absurd action legible.

References

1. Albertina, Drolerien mit Mann im Korb, 7797 recto, current metadata, German commentary and the complete 2022 Tales of the City catalogue entry reproduced there. View source.
2. BRCP Catalogue Raisonné (2016), object dates in catalogues 1, 2, 8, 15 and 20; catalogue 20 object metadata only for the Haywain comparison. View source
3. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2016 exhibition wall texts, p. 3: approximate date of KdZ 549. View source
4. Matthijs Ilsink and colleagues, Hieronymus Bosch, Painter and Draughtsman: Catalogue Raisonné (2016), catalogue 46, pp. 538–541, complete entry and plates. View source.
5. Albertina, Burleske Szene mit Hopfenkorb, 7797 verso, current metadata and commentary for the reverse. View source.
6. Larry Silver, review of Fritz Koreny, Hieronymus Bosch. Die Zeichnungen, HNA Newsletter 29, no. 2 (November 2012), pp. 19–20, complete review; the Koreny catalogue is discussed through the review and museum commentary. View source.
7. Splash image, Hieronymus Bosch, Man in a Basket and Comic Figures, around 1500–1515, pen and ink on paper, Albertina, Vienna, 7797 recto. View source.