Ship of Fools: A Floating World of Absurdity and Gold

As a child, I loved pirate ships. I remember spending hours building elaborate LEGO galleons, populating them with mutinous crews, lost captains, and treasure-hoarding monkeys. That early obsession with high-seas adventure slowly drifted eastward when I discovered Shogun by James Clavell; the sweeping epic of William Adams, the English sailor who found himself shipwrecked in Japan and eventually became a samurai. It was one of those rare stories that felt like it had been written just for me.

Nanban Byobu Folding Screen, Portuguese Traders in Nagasaki by Kano Domi, 16th/17th century

Years later, working in an auction house, I found myself surrounded by Japanese art. Nanban screens particularly fascinated me, these luminous gold-leaf panels showing 16th-century Portuguese ships arriving in Japan, bustling with exotic animals, missionaries, soldiers, and entertainers. There’s something wonderfully theatrical about them; a little grotesque, a little curious, full of movement and miscommunication. It felt inevitable that all of these influences: the LEGO, the pirates, the nanban screens, Shogun, and the lives of European adventurers in Japan, would one day come together in a painting.

But the deeper conceptual anchor for this work is the Ship of Fools: that powerful image from the Northern Renaissance, especially as painted by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. A drifting boat of humanity, full of passengers blind to their fate, caught up in petty quarrels, revelry, or delusion. That allegorical absurdity spoke to me. Maybe, as I’ve grown older, my view of humanity has darkened a little. I didn’t want this to become a ‘Where’s Wally?’ picture crammed with random clutter, but I did want a composition rich in characters, each one expressing some foolish impulse, vice, or vanity. And maybe a little pathos too.

Edward Luper, The Namban Ship of Plastic Fools, 2025

Technically, the painting took over a year. I worked on Japanese paper, first sizing and mounting it onto a wooden panel, then applying layers of traditional sabi gesso, a kind of earthy clay-based ground, followed by gold leaf affixed with nikawa, an animal glue that is notoriously sensitive to temperature and time. The painting itself is executed in mineral pigments also bound with nikawa. In winter, the glue goes hard and must be constantly re-heated, which gives the work an almost monastic rhythm. It’s a slow, unforgiving medium, but one that glows when it works.

Oskar Laske, Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), 1913

Compositionally, I was also inspired by Oskar Laske’s 1913 painting Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), which I first saw in Vienna, a city whose melancholy grandeur always seems to bring out the theatrical in me. While in Vienna, I revisited Bruegel’s works too, especially The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, and felt their presence again in the detailed crowd scenes of my own painting. But unlike those, this is no moralising sermon as such. There’s no clear direction to this ship which seems about to go under, no final port. It simply drifts, gilded, comic, overburdened, into a dark, swirling sea with sharks.

For the upcoming auction at Bonhams, please see the link below:

Bonhams : EDWARD LUPER The Namban Ship of Plastic Fools2025 59.4 x 84.1 cm.