Hieronymus Bosch  

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Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 - August 9, 1516) was a prolific Dutch painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries best known for his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Themes

Many of his works depict sin and human moral failings. Bosch used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man. The works contain complex, highly original, imaginative, and dense use of symbolic figures and iconography, some of which was obscure even in his own time. He is said to have been an inspiration for the surrealist movement in the twentieth century.


Biography

His true name was Jheronimus (or Jeroen) van Aken (meaning "from Aachen"). He signed some of his paintings with Bosch (pronounced as Boss in Dutch), derived from his birthplace 's-Hertogenbosch. In Spanish, he is often called El Bosco.

Born to a family of Dutch and German painters, he spent most of his life in 's-Hertogenbosch, a flourishing city in fifteenth century Brabant, in the south of the present-day Netherlands. In 1463, some 4000 houses in the town were destroyed by a catastrophic fire, which the then (approximately) 13-year-old Bosch may have witnessed. He became a popular painter and even received commissions from abroad. In 1488 he joined the Brotherhood of Our Lady, an arch-conservative religious group of some 40 influential citizens of 's-Hertogenbosch and some 7000 'outer-members' from all over Europe.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Hieronymus Bosch" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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