The Geuzen Book

I started illustrating Louis Paul Boon’s 774 pages masterpiece The Geuzen Book in the spring of  2020. By 2021 I expect to have produced over 50 drawings telling the story of the horrific terror of the Inquisition, the poverty, and social inequality during the religious conflict in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century. I think my direct and sketch-like drawing style gels very well with Boon’s work. His unrelenting and at the same time touching humour, together with the evocative, hilarious descriptions of the characters and historical events turn The Geuzen Book into a playground for a draughtswoman like myself.

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On the Grand Place by the Bread House all writings and printings of the newcomers had been thrown onto a pile by ordinance of her father and to the satisfaction of her aunt, the Regentess.
For she, that harpy, erected in his honour a different kind of triumphal arch, one that was to be more agreeable to his eye.
They trudged on towards Germany. And behind them the wintry trees bore strange fruit: the hanged, tied back to back, swaying in the icy wind.
Book view
And most of the times he made his arrests in the middle of the night, preferably during a heavy thunderstorm in which he turned up accompanied by masked men that looked like devils. Thus he truly was the devil in the service of the Roman inquisition.
That day Charles had to escape on a farmer’s cart from Innsbruck bound for Flanders, disguised as an old woman.
How as a result of the far too long journey they suffered a lack of drinking water, how they started running out of pilot bread and many were affected by scurvy, how while singing psalms dead children had to be lowered over the side into the sea.
She hobbled, stumbled, and sometimes fell. But kicked to her feet by the henchmen she hobbled and stumbled on.
More and more cumbersome it became for her to bend over the increasingly gruesome content and caress what still remained.
And when finally then the flames started to lick up high, one of the two shouted: ‘I can see a rain of roses.’