Little is known of Bosch’s life, though there are some records. He spent most of it in the town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, where he was born in his grandfather’s house. The roots of his forefathers are in Nijmegen and Aachen. His pessimistic fantastical style cast a wide influence on northern art of the 16th century, with Pieter Bruegel the Elder being his best-known follower. Today, Bosch is seen as a hugely individualistic painter with deep insight into humanity’s desires and deepest fears. Attribution has been especially difficult; today only about 25 paintings are confidently given to his hand along with eight drawings. About another half-dozen paintings are confidently attributed to his workshop.
5 Facts About the Mysterious World Of Hieronymus Bosch
Discover more about one of art’s great outliers
By Google Arts & Culture
Once you have seen a painting by Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch you are not likely to forget it. His paintings are littered with extraordinary images. On the face of it they look like ordinary Biblical landscapes but look closer and you start to see all sorts of bizarre creatures, grotesqueries and human misery.
Working in the late 15th century, around the time of the Renaissance, Bosch made work unlike anything else that dates from that time. But what inspired his work and what do we know really about one of the most mysterious and unique artists in history? Scroll on for five facts…
1. He came from a long line of painters
His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all painters, as were several of his uncles. They all lived and worked in and around the Dutch province of Hertogenbosch. His father was an artistic adviser to the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady, a religious order that Bosch himself joined in the late 1480s.
It was the Brotherhood that recorded what little we know of Bosch’s life, including his death in 1516 and his funeral, held on August 9 of the same year. Although it’s not clear how he died or exactly how old he was at the time.
2. Hieronymus Bosch was not his real name
Although he signed his work Hieronymus Bosch, his name has also been recorded as Jereon, Jerom or Jerome, a more traditional form of the name. His friends and family simply called him Joen, although he used Hieronymous for official purposes.
His surname, like that of his father, was Anthonissen, often shortened to van Aeken. It is likely that he used the name Bosch after his hometown Den Bosch (‘the forest’).
3. His paintings drew on his own experience
In his young teens, Bosch witnessed a fire ravage his home town of Den Bosch, destroying more than 4,000 homes. It’s believed the trauma of this event featured in many of his paintings, with burning buildings being found in the background of a number of his works.
Much of the imagery in his work is rife with symbolism despite its often otherworldly nature. This has long been the subject of interpretation. As he left no writings about his work, we’re left to speculate.
4. Bosch was a devout Christian
Despite accusations of heresy over the centuries, and the shocking content of some of his paintings, Bosch was actually a devout Christian. Much of his work documents the contemporary medieval interpretations of hell and suffering that a life of sin would cause.
His work often focuses on themes such as temptation, sin and judgement. Many of the monsters and horrific creatures depicted are thought to be based on his own personal demons and fear of straying from the virtuous path.
5. His technique was highly unusual
As well as the unusual choice of imagery and subject matter, Bosch was highly unorthodox in his application of paint. Unlike many of his Dutch contemporaries in the 15th and 16th centuries, who strove for perfection, Bosch laid his paint on thickly creating a rougher, almost sketch like quality.
Bosch was really an outlier in the world of art, decades or even centuries ahead of his time. That’s why his work continues to attract attention and devotion five centuries later. Even though only around 25 of his works are thought to have survived, his influence is still felt across the art world today.
Hieronymus Bosch was born in about 1450 in ’s-Hertogenbosch, where he lived and worked all his life. He came from a family of painters. Not only his father, who was presumably his teacher, but also his brother, a cousin and several uncles worked in the family studio in the market square of ’s-Hertogenbosch.
One of his important clients was the Confraternity of Our Lady. Bosch made several works for the redecoration of their chapel in Saint John’s Cathedral. He also advised the brothers regarding assignments to other artists and craftsmen, and was sometimes called upon to appraise the work they submitted.
However beautiful Bosch’s fanciful paintings may be, art historians are still often uncertain as to what they mean. Many of them, like the painting of Saint Christopher, depict bizarre worlds and creatures. Fish with legs, along with demons and monsters are recurrent motifs in Bosch´s oeuvre. Here, the animals are more earthly, but are strangely attendant to the pedlar’s every move.
The iniquity of humankind is a central theme in many of his works. The famous Pedlar is a case in point. Though opinions differ, it is generally believed to represent man’s journey through life. The pedlar in the painting is interpreted as Man, weighed down by the burden of sin on his back, endeavouring to live his life without succumbing to earthly temptation.
Temptation is represented here by the brothel in the background.
Bosch’s famously wry sense of humor is also on display!
Credits: All media
The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
Städel Museum
The National Gallery, London
Stories from these collections
Source: Google Arts & Culture
Hiëronymus Bosch
Hiëronymus Bosch, also spelled Jheronimus Bos, pseudonym of Jeroen van Aeken, Aeken also spelled Aquen or Aken, also called Jeroen Anthoniszoon, (born c. 1450, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Brabant [now in the Netherlands]—buried August 9, 1516, ’s-Hertogenbosch), brilliant and original northern European painter whose work reveals an unusual iconography of a complex and individual style. He was recognized as a highly imaginative “creator of devils” and a powerful inventor of seeming nonsense full of satirical and moralizing meaning.
Bosch was a pessimistic and stern moralist who had neither illusions about the rationality of human nature nor confidence in the kindness of a world that had been corrupted by human presence in it. His paintings are sermons on folly and sin, addressed often to initiates and consequently difficult to translate. Unable to unlock the mystery of the artist’s works, critics at first believed that he must have been affiliated with secret sects.
Although the themes of his work were often religious, his choice of symbols to represent the temptation and eventual ensnarement of humans in earthly evils caused many critics to view the artist as a practitioner of the occult arts. More recent scholarship views Bosch as a talented artist who possessed deep insight into human character and as one of the first artists to represent abstract concepts in his work. A number of exhaustive interpretations of Bosch’s work have been put forth, but there remain many obscure details.
An exact chronology of Bosch’s surviving work is difficult because, of the approximately 35 to 40 paintings attributed to him, only 7 are signed and none are dated. There exists little documentary information on the early life of the artist, other than the fact that he was the son and grandson of accomplished painters. His name does appear on the register of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, located in the city of his birth, and there is mention of him in official records from 1486 until the year of his death, when he was acclaimed an Insignis pictor (“distinguished painter”). In addition to painting, he undertook decorative works and altarpieces and executed designs for stained glass.
Works attributed to his youthful period show an awkwardness in drawing and composition and brushwork somewhat limited in its scope. Such paintings as The Cure of Folly, Crucifixion, The Adoration of the Magi, The Seven Deadly Sins, The Marriage at Cana, Ecce Homo, and The Conjurer are representative of that period. The presence of certain motifs, expanded in the more-sophisticated works of the artist’s middle period, and a limited technique, unsure yet bold, provide a beginning from which to view Bosch’s artistic origins. Between the first painting in that early group, The Cure of Folly, and the last, The Conjurer, a steady development can be seen. The iconography of the latter is more complex, and the characteristic themes that received their fullest expression in the great masterpieces of his late period have begun to emerge.
In those early paintings Bosch had begun to depict humanity’s vulnerability to the temptation of evil, the deceptive allure of sin, and the obsessive attraction of lust, heresy, and obscenity. In calm and prosaic settings, groups of people exemplify the credulity, ignorance, and absurdities of the human race. However, the imagery of the early works is still relatively conventional, with only an occasional intrusion of the bizarre in the form of a lurking demon or a strangely dressed magician.
To Bosch’s fruitful middle period belong the great panoramic triptychs such as the Haywain, The Temptation of St. Anthony, and The Garden of Earthly Delights. His figures are graceful and his colours subtle and sure, and all is in motion in those ambitious and extremely complex works. The paintings are marked by an eruption of fantasy, expressed in monstrous apocalyptic scenes of chaos and nightmare that are contrasted and juxtaposed with idyllic portrayals of humankind in the age of innocence.
During this period Bosch elaborated on his early ideas, and the few paintings that survive establish the evolution of his thought. Bosch’s disconcerting mixture of fantasy and reality is further developed in the Haywain, the outside wings, or cover panels, of which recall the scenes of The Seven Deadly Sins. The cursive style that he worked out for the triptych resembles that of watercolour. In the central panel, a rendition of the Flemish proverb “The world is a haystack from which each takes what he can,” Bosch shows the trickery of the demon who guides the procession of people from the earthly paradise depicted on the left wing to the horrors of hell shown on the right one.
Bosch’s The Temptation of St. Anthony displays his ascent to stylistic maturity. The brushstrokes are sharper and terser, with much more command than before. The composition becomes more fluid, and space is regulated by the incidents and creatures that the viewer’s attention is focused on. His mastery of fine brush-point calligraphy, permitting subtle nuances of contour and movement, is fully evident.
Bosch portrays the human struggle against temptation, as well as the omnipresence of the Devil, in his St. Anthony, one of the best keys to the artist’s personal iconography. The hermit saint in this work is cast as the heroic symbol of humankind. In the central panel St. Anthony is beset by an array of grotesque demons, their horrible bodies being brilliantly visualized amalgamations of human, animal, vegetable, and inanimate parts. In the background is a hellish, fantastically bizarre landscape painted with the most exquisite detail. Bosch’s development of the theme of the charlatan deceiving humans and taking away their salvation receives its fullest exposition in St. Anthony, with its condemnation of heresy and the seductions of false doctrines.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, representative of Bosch at his mature best, shows the earthly paradise with the creation of woman, the first temptation, and the Fall. The painting’s beautiful and unsettling images of sensuality and of the dreams that afflict the people who live in a pleasure-seeking world express Bosch’s iconographic originality with tremendous force. The chief characteristic of this work is perhaps its dreamlike quality; multitudes of nude human figures, giant birds, and horses cavort and frolic in a delightfully implausible, otherworldly landscape, and all the elements come together to produce a perfect, harmonious whole.
Bosch’s late works are fundamentally different. The scale changes radically, and, instead of meadows or hellish landscapes inhabited by hundreds of tiny beings, he painted densely compacted groups of half-length figures pressed tight against the picture plane. In those dramatic close-ups, of which The Crowning with Thorns and Christ Carrying the Cross are representative, the event is portrayed so near that the spectator seems to participate in it physically as well as psychologically. The most peaceful and untroubled of Bosch’s mature works depict various saints in contemplation or repose. Among those works are St. John the Evangelist on Patmos and St. Jerome in Prayer.
Bosch’s preoccupation in much of his work with the evils of the world did not preclude his vision of a world full of beauty. His adeptness at handling colour harmonies and at creating deeply felt works of the imagination is readily apparent. Though a spate of imitators tried to appropriate his visual style, its uniqueness prevented his having any real followers.
Source: Britanica
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting
Hieronymus Bosch Painting