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Anonymous, Portrait of Hieronymus Bosch, ca. 1550.

Red and black chalk drawing in the Arras Codex, 41 × 28 cm.

Bibliothèque Municipale, Arras.

Biography

1453: Birth of Hieronymus Van Aken in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (now Bois-le-Duc). His family, of modest origin, most likely originated from Aken (the last name Van Aken literally means “from Aken”), having lived there for more than two generations. There are documents that prove the presence in ‘s-Hertogenbosch of Bosch’s ancestors as early as the end of the 14^th century. His father Anthonius Van Aken and his grandfather Jan were painters. We know that Bosch was born into a family of painters and artists, but we know nothing of his training or formal education. We can surmise that he was educated and trained by his family. The nickname Bosch obviously stems from an abbreviation of the painter’s place of origin, ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

‘S-Hertogenbosch is situated in Brabant and is the fourth city of Duchy, established in the 15^th century. There was no princely residence in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, as in Brussels, Lille or Louvain, nor were there great noble families comparable to the Nassau of Breda or other patrons from the Netherlands. ‘S-Hertogenbosch lacked the great financial backers apart from those who lived in the city itself who, in spite of their activity, could not rival the other greater cities of Duchy.

1474: Date of the first mention of Hieronymus in records. It concerned a transaction done with his sister. He is mentioned as a painter for the first time in 1480.

1481: He marries Aleyt Van den Mervenne, a rich aristocrat. We do not know if the couple ever had children. Aleyt survived her husband and died between 1522 and 1523 at an old age, which we know because she was almost twenty years older than the painter.

1486: From this date onwards, he is cited as a member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. Membership to this brotherhood was already a long family tradition because certain members of the Van Aken family were members as early as the end of the 14^th century. The number of brotherhoods in honor of the Virgin increased throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The majority of the cities in the Netherlands soon had their own proper brotherhood. In Bosch’s time, the number of men and women registered at ‘s-Hertogenbosch’s brotherhood had become substantial.

The goal of the brotherhood was essentially the devotion of Mary and occasionally the distribution of aid to the poor. This pious institution played an important role in the city, less from a religious than from an artistic and social point of view. In effect, the brotherhood would commission a number of works from local artists and exteriors for the decoration of the chapels. Two painted leaves from the restoration of a work by Van Wessel around 1475–1476 are attributed to Bosch. He did several works for the Brotherhood of Our Lady.

1493–1494: He drew up the plans for the stained-glass windows and collaborated in the execution of a panel with the names of the brotherhood’s members.

1504: Philipp the Beautiful, Sovereign of the Netherlands and King of Castille, commissions The Last Judgement.

1508–1509: He does the gilt and polychrome decoration of a restoration for the chapel of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. He also does the model of a cross (1511–1512).

1516: Death of the painter in ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

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In 1951, Wilhelm Fränger’s tome, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch: Outlines of a New Interpretation, was translated into English. The book created a sensation, both on the scholarly and the popular levels. An article on the book accompanied by colour illustrations in Life Magazine probably did more than anything else to popularise Bosch, because there had been little or nothing of the sort published on him at the time. Fränger’s interpretation that Bosch did his major altarpieces not for orthodox religious purposes, but for use by quasi-religious cults was being promoted as a turning-point in the understanding of this enigmatic artist.

The Man-Tree

ca. 1470

Pen and bistre, 27.7 × 21.1 cm

Albertina, Vienna

While most art historians who have taken up Bosch in the years since Fränger’s death in 1964 have renounced Fränger’s contentions, there are still some who continue to endorse his assertion that the grand master of a cult of Adamites dictated its secret imagery to Bosch which he then revealed in his great painting in the Prado Museum, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and in several minor paintings.

The Adoration of the Magi

ca. 1470–1475

Oil and gold on wood, 71.1 × 56.5 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The writers who commented upon Bosch in the nearly five centuries following his death compounded such a reputation for the man as a “faizeur de diables” (Gossart), that until the modern period he was hardly considered an artist at all.

The Adoration of the Magi (detail)

ca. 1470–1475

Oil and gold on wood

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It was largely his frenzied hell scenes that attracted such attention. When he depicted the creatures and settings of these “hells” in terms of infinitely detailed naturalism, they were so convincing as to seem pure evocation.

The Adoration of the Magi (detail)

ca. 1470–1475

Oil and gold on wood

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

To the medieval mind, the man who could reveal so plainly its own worst fears must have been a wizard or a madman, perhaps the tool of the Devil himself. Later writers either reflected this point of view or, following the rationalist aftermath of the Renaissance and the Reformation, passed Bosch off as representing the worst of Medievalism.

The Adoration of the Magi (detail)

ca. 1470–1475

Oil and gold on wood

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

When he was mentioned it was not so much as an artist, but as a freak performer. Eventually Bosch was obscured and forgotten. It took at least two centuries until there was a revival of interest in him, in the late 19^th century.

The 20^th century saw more emphasis on this man as an artist than at any time in the past and there is continued, almost overwhelming interest in him in the 21^st century.

Ecce Homo

1475–1480

Tempera and oil on oak, 71 × 61 cm

Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

One would expect Italian writers of the High Renaissance period to point out the painter’s strangeness, since his ideation was so antithetical to that of the South. The Florentine historian Guicciardini, in his Description of all the Low Countries (1567), referred to “Jerome Bosch de Boisleduc, very noble and admirable inventor of fantastic and bizarre things…” In 1568, the Italian historian of artists, Vasari, called Boschian invention “fantastiche e capricciose.”

The Magician

1475–1480

Oil on panel, 53 × 75 cm

Musée municipal, Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Lomazzo, the author of the Treatise on the Art of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, first published in 1584, spoke of “the Flemish Girolamo Bosch, who in representing strange appearances and frightful and horrid dreams, was singular and truly divine.”

During the same period in the North, similar statements were made concerning the painter’s work, his demons and hells being mentioned to the exclusion of all else.

Child with a Walking Frame (reverse of Christ Carrying the Cross)

ca. 1480

Oil on panel, diameter: 28 cm

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The Netherlandish historian, Marc Van Vaernewijck (1567), called Bosch “the maker of devils, since he had no rival in the art of depicting demons.”

Carel Van Mander, the Northern counterpart to Vasari, made little more observation of Bosch’s entire works than that they were “…gruesome pictures of spooks and horrid phantoms of hell…”

Christ Carrying the Cross

ca. 1480–1490

Oil on wood, 57 × 32 cm

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Numerous statements in the same vein began to appear in Spanish writing following the influx of so many of Bosch’s paintings into mid-sixteenth-century Spain.

King Philip II, himself, was chiefly responsible for the painter’s popularity in Spain. Philip owned as many as thirty-six of these paintings, amazing considered that Bosch’s entire output is believed to number barely forty.

Death and the Miser

ca. 1485–1490

Oil on panel, 93 × 31 cm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Such a large collection, accumulated in so few years after the painter’s death, attests to a fascination on the king’s part – a state of mind that prompted some of the first penetrating writing on Boschian work.

This was because the monk, Joseph de Siguença, who inventoried the king’s paintings shortly after Philip’s death in 1598, felt compelled to apologise for the king’s obsessive interest in Bosch.

Death and the Miser (detail)

ca. 1485–1490

Oil on panel

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Perhaps Fray Joseph feared a destructive attention of the Inquisition, because he wrote an elaborate defense of the painter’s orthodoxy and fidelity to nature: “Among the German and Flemish paintings which are, as I say, numerous, many paintings by Hieronymus Bosch are scattered throughout the house (Escorial); I should like to speak for different reasons a little longer about this painter,

Extracting the Stone of Madness

ca. 1490

Oil on panel, 47.5 × 34.5 cm

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

for his great genius deserves it, although in general people call his work absurdities…, people who do not look very attentively at what they contemplate, and I think for that reason that he is wrongly denounced as a heretic – and to begin there – I have of the piety and zeal of the king, our founder, an opinion such (that I think that) if he [Bosch] had been thus, he [the King] would not have admitted his paintings in his house, in his convents, in his bedroom, in the Chapter of his orders, in his sacristy, while on the contrary, all these places are adorned with them.

Extracting the Stone of Madness (detail)

ca. 1490

Oil on panel

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Except for this reason, which seems very important to me, there is still another which I deduce from his paintings for one sees almost all the sacraments and ranks and degrees of the Church there, from the pope to the most humble, two points where all heretics falter, and he painted them with his zeal and a great observation, which he would not have done as a heretic, and with the mysteries of our Salvation he did the same thing.

Crucifixion with a Donor

ca. 1490

Oil on panel, 74.7 × 61 cm

Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

I should like to show now that his paintings are not at all [absurdities], but like books of great wisdom and art, and if there are any foolish actions, they are ours, not his, and let us say it, it is a painted satire of the sins and inconstancy of men”.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony

ca. 1490

Oil on panel, 73 × 52.5 cm

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

An interesting counter-reaction to that of the monk is the statement by Francesco Pacheco – the teacher and father-in-law of Velasquez – as written sometime later, in 1649: “There are nough documents speaking of the superior and more difficult things, which are the personages, if one finds time for such pleasures, which were always disdained by the great masters – nevertheless some seek these pleasures:

Saint Christopher

ca. 1490

Oil on panel, 113 × 72 cm

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

that is the case for the ingenious ideas of Hieronymus Bosch with the diversity of forms that he gave to his demons, in the invention of which our King Philip II found so much pleasure, which is proved by the great number of them he accumulated. But Father Siguença praises them excessively, making of these fantasies mysteries that we would not recommend to our painters. And we pass on to more agreeable subjects of painting…”

Ecce Homo

ca. 1490

Oil and gold on panel, 52.1 × 54 cm

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

Pacheco was a Spanish painter and art theorist of the artistic period between Mannerism and Baroque. He had rejected the manneristic delight in mere form and was turning toward an interest in naturalistic illusionism.

From either point of view he would have found Bosch’s work unacceptable. Even though Pacheco’s concern was with Bosch as an artist, he passed him off as an oddity, and this reputation clung round the painter for two and a half centuries to come.

Christ Mocked also called The Crowning with Thorns

ca. 1490–1500

Oil on oak panel, 73.8 × 59 cm

The National Gallery, London

During this period there was little attention given by scholars to Northern art at all; when it was considered, Bosch was obscured by the great Netherlandish painters ranging from Van Eyck to Brueghel. It was not until the end of the last century that any respectable scholarship was brought to bear upon the painter.

The Pedlar

1490–1505

Oil on panel, 71 × 70.6 cm

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Perhaps this was a consequence of the realistic impulse that entered mid-nineteenth-century painting. Historians began to look for precursors to this realism in the past. They turned again to an interest in Northern art and in reemphasising Brueghel, “discovered” Bosch.

Such historians as Ebeling and Mosman sorted through the aged registers of his native town ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a Dutch town near the German border, but the result was disappointing.

The Ship of Fools

After 1491

Oil on panel, 58 × 33 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

The date of Bosch’s death was discovered in a registry of names and armorial bearings – listed as 1516.

His birth date was not found, but because his portrait, which was discovered in the Arras Codex, showed a man of about sixty, his birth was assumed to have been around 1450.

Allegory of Intemperance

ca. 1495–1500

Oil on panel, 35.9 × 31.4 cm

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

There are a few references to Bosch between these dates in the archives of the Brotherhood of Our Lady at ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

Several items referred to his having been paid various sums for works commissioned of him. None of this was very informative about essential details of Bosch’s life, save that, since he was referred to once as “illustrious painter”, he was obviously held in repute as an artist by his fellows.

Owl’s Nest

Pen and bistre, 14 × 19.6 cm

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

There is no reason to think, from these references at least, that his friends considered Bosch either a wizard or a madman. As to his ancestry, since Bosch’s name often bore the suffix Van Aken, it was believed that his forebears were from Aachen, just over the Dutch-German border. Five Van Akens were mentioned in the town records before the time of Hieronymus.

Singers in an Egg

Oil on panel, 108.5 × 126.5 cm

Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille

One, a teacher named Jan Van Aken, was noted in the archives of ‘s-Hertogenbosch’s Cathedral of Saint John in references covering several years (1423–1434).