Christ Child with a Walking Frame

This is a small round painting, only about 28 centimetres across, and it lives on the back of another Bosch, his Christ Carrying the Cross. When the altar wing was folded shut, this exterior was what people saw first. It shows the Christ child as a toddler taking his first steps inside a little wheeled wooden walking frame, gripping the bar with one hand. In the other he holds a whirligig, a child's pinwheel on a stick. The pairing is the whole point. On the front the grown Christ staggers under the Cross. Here, on the back, the same figure is a baby wobbling forward on unsteady legs. Some read the spinning pinwheel in his hand as a quiet nod to the Cross he would one day carry.