Bryson Burroughs

“ The beauty of the workmanship and the artist's method are discernible. One can see that the panel was prepared with white, as was the custom, and that over a careful drawing the color was applied directly and very thinly, in places merely a scumble of paint. The thin pigment vitrified in the course of years allows the white ground to show through, so the effect is blond and translucent. There seems to have been but little retouching afterward or glazing. Its lightness of handling is a departure from the heavier methods of Bosch's contemporaries. ”

“ A stableman looks out of a window behind him and two shepherds are at another window in the ruined wall behind the Virgin and Child. All these are lowly people of familiar aspect in distinction to the fantastic kings whose inspiration seems to have come largely from travelers' stories of Africa or the East. The shepherds, indeed, are so real in type and attitude that losing sight of the holy character of the subject, one feels that curiosity of the extraordinary happening of a visit of kings to their neighborhood brings them hither. They are merely onlookers. ”

“ The ox and the ass are resting within the doorway of a tumble-down tower and from its top and that of a free-standing wall opposite, child angels are stretching a canopy of green drapery in honor of the ceremony. ”

“ His artistic personality is made up of naturalism, the love of genre and of the fantastic, and an unsuppressible mockery, qualities inherent in his race, which had already interwoven familiar touches of everyday life with the saints and angels on the cathedrals, and had covered the margins of grave manuscripts with humorous or malicious inventions. ”

“ The expression of our picture is unusually gracious, more lyrical than that of the universally recognized works. The drawing, though extremely sensitive, is not so vigorous as in the well-known examples. ”