Highlights
This selection of translations over the past 35 years shows some of the memorable projects I've had the privilege of working on. There's quite a lot of Hieronymus Bosch and also examples of translations from French and German in addition to all the ones from Dutch. A full list of nearly 260 published books can be found in this PDF.
Koenraad Jonckheere, A New History of Western Art: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Yale/Hannibal 2022)
The amazing reviews for this book speak for themselves:
“There are many stories of western art that have been written, almost all of them focused on artists, nations, and traditions. But Jonckheere’s daring book is a learned and eminently readable story of the art itself, about the questions that works of art try and often fail to answer, and about what they do to us in the process. It’s a catalyst for teaching and thinking anew.”
Marisa Anne Bass, Yale University
“No other history of art comes close to Jonckheere’s. It’s as engagingly written as Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art. It’s neither pedestrian nor a survey of an out-of-date canon. It’s the most ambitious and original general history of art we have ever had. Vigorous, up-to-date, unprejudiced and lively, it’s a history of art of our time and for our time.”
David Freedberg, Columbia University
“This insightful book will remain relevant even in shifting times. It is coherent, thoughtful, even wise, and it has that voice missing from so many studies of art with a larger scope.”
Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania
Maximiliaan Martens, Till-Holger Borchert, Jan Dumolyn (eds.)
Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution
(Thames & Hudson, 2020).
Jackie Wullschläger of the Financial Times included this book, for which I translated all the Dutch texts, in the paper’s list of recommended summer reads:
"This fat, scholarly, beautifully produced catalogue will for many be a substitute for seeing Ghent’s groundbreaking Van Eyck show, sadly closed midway through its run in March. Emerging from a medieval world view, Van Eyck’s fresh, exhilarated naturalism determined the course of western art."
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, Prints in Paris 1900: From Elite to the Street (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum 2017)
It's always a pleasure to work on exhibition catalogues and other books for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but this one was particularly special. The museum has a big collection of
fin-de-siècle French prints, which it has placed online in an amazing, searchable and downloadable
database, which I also helped translate. I completed a six-year fine-art printmaking course in 2018 at the Leuven academy (SLAC), which made working on both the website and the exhibition catalogue even more rewarding.
Till-Holger Borchert, Bosch in Detail (Antwerp: Ludion 2016)
More Bosch from 2016, this time a rare translation from German (which I do if the subject matter is in my comfort zone). The amazing In Detail series is published by Ludion and uses the latest high-resolution images so that leading art historians can explore selected details. I also translated Manfred Sellinck's Bruegel in Detail in 2014.
Matthijs Ilsink, Jos Koldeweij, Ron Spronk et al.,Hieronymus Bosch, Painter and Draughtsman. Catalogue raisonné (Brussels: Mercatorfonds 2016)
This new catalogue raisonné of Hieronymus Bosch's paintings and drawings was probably the most important of the several books I translated on the artist in 2016, the 500th anniversary of his death. There were major international exhibitions in Madrid and in the painter's home town of s-Hertogenbosch, for which I did the catalogue and visitor guide too. The King of the Netherlands opened the Dutch exhibition, which I also got to attend.
Jacqueline Marette, Wooden Supports in 12th-16th-Century European Paintings (Copenhagen: CATS 2016)
This is a French-English translation I did with my long-term collaborator Paul Van Calster. It is
published online by the Getty Foundation.
The French art historian Jacqueline Marette published her pioneering
Connaissance des Primitifs par l'étude du bois du XIIe au XVIe siècle in 1961. It was the first major study of the wooden panels used as a support by medieval painters. The type and age of the wood, together with the construction and preparation of the panels are key elements in art historical research nowadays, but this groundbreaking study had not previously been available in English.
Marije Vellekoop & Nienke Bakker, Van Gogh at Work
(Yale University Press, 2013)
This was a co-translation with Michael Hoyle, the doyen of Dutch-English art history translators. I did the biographical half of the book.
Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Manfred Sellink & Till-Holger Borchert (eds.), Imperial Treasures: Masterpieces from the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna (Tielt-Weesp: Lannoo, 2011). Co-translator, Dutch and German texts
I translated texts from both Dutch and German for this exhibition catalogue.
Nico Van Hout, The Unfinished Painting (Antwerp: Ludion, 2012)
Included in The Independent's Books of the Year 2012.
Roger H. Marijnissen and Peter Ruyffelaere, Hieronymus Bosch (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1987)
This is where it all started. Fresh out of university, I was asked to translate a hefty monograph on Hieronymus Bosch. This was pre-internet and even PCs were only just becoming affordable. I did the work on an Amstrad PCW armed with a small Wolters Dutch-English dictionary. Fortunately, I could rely on the encouragement and feedback of Prof. Peter King, especially for the swathes of Middle Dutch.
Looking back, I can't quite believe I had the nerve to accept the job, having only done a few, very varied assignments before that: a novella by the Belgian Magic Realist Hubert Lampo, a Dutch memoir about tracking and recovering RAF planes shot down over the Netherlands and a retail training course for Bradford City Council (!).
Since then, Hieronymus Bosch has cropped up regularly in my work, most notably during the 500th anniversary of the artist's death in 2016. There are a couple more examples on this page.