The Prodigal Son in Misery

In the parable the story ends well: the ruined son goes home, and his father runs to meet him and forgives everything. This series never gets there. It follows only the downward half, and this is where it bottoms out, the young man destitute after the pleasures, the expulsion and the closed doors of the other scenes. In Luke he sinks so low that he envies the pigs he is set to feed, then resolves to go home. Jan de Beer painted the moment of misery itself around 1520 in Antwerp, without the relief that follows in the text. Two of these cloths, the brothel scenes, reached Basel in 1901 with the bequest of the collector Louise Elisabeth Bachofen-Burckhardt.