5 Facts About the Mysterious World Of Hieronymus Bosch

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.

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.

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. 

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.  

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.

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.