Collection: Ship of Fools

The idea to paint portraits of fools from the ‘Ship of Fools’ came from a book of the same name written by the German medieval author, Sebastian Brant and published in 1494. In the story the fools were rounded up off the streets because there were too many fools. They were put on a ship and sent off to the land of fools or the fool’s paradise Narvagonia. The follies exhibited by the fools were things such as being a drunkard, corruption, untrained physician, procrastination, marrying for money and the list goes on. Unfortunately for the passengers on the ship they had no sensible leadership so the ship was destined for disaster.  

This book was extremely popular and was reprinted many times over many years. It was possibly the world’s first best seller (excluding the bible).

Today’s fools are not so different, showing that we’ve learnt little as a species in the past 500 years. The ship may represent our earth and the fools represent the human race.