Den Bosch visionary who filled hell with household demons
Hieronymus Bosch, born Jheronimus van Aken about 1450 and dead 9 August 1516, painted Early Netherlandish nightmares from one Brabant town. At least sixteen triptychs are known; eight survive whole. No letters explain the hybrids that still look modern.
Almost nothing personal survives about Bosch. He wrote no surviving letters or diaries, and what we know comes from terse entries in the town accounts of 's-Hertogenbosch and in the books of the religious confraternity he joined, the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady. Even his birth year is an estimate, around 1450. His real name was Jheronimus van Aken, a surname pointing back to ancestors from Aachen, and he took the name Bosch from his home town, known locally as Den Bosch, the forest.
Painting was the family business. His grandfather Jan van Aken, first recorded in 1430, had five sons, four of them painters, and his father Anthonius advised the Brotherhood on artistic matters; one of them presumably trained him, though none of their pictures survive. In 1463 a fire wrecked some 4,000 houses in the town when he was about thirteen. Sometime between 1479 and 1481 he married Aleid Goyaerts van den Meervenne, a slightly older woman from a rich family, and they moved to Oirschot, where she had inherited property. He joined the Brotherhood in 1486 or 1487, and Saint John's church marked his death with a memorial mass on 9 August 1516.
He produced at least sixteen triptychs, and about twenty-five paintings can now be credited to him. Unusually for the period he signed some works but dated none. He worked in oil on oak with an ordinary palette: azurite for skies, copper greens for foliage, lead-tin yellow, ochres and red lake for figures. Yet his sometimes rough, visible brushwork broke with the Netherlandish habit of hiding the hand under smooth glazes.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, from roughly 1495 to 1505, runs from Eden, with an unusually youthful God presenting Eve to Adam, to a frozen night-time hell lit by explosions. Philip II of Spain collected Bosch heavily in the late sixteenth century, which is why the Prado holds that triptych and The Haywain. Twentieth-century claims that Bosch drew on heretical sects remain speculative, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder became his best-known follower.
Source: Hieronymus Bosch
