Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch painter, born around 1450 in the town of 's-Hertogenbosch, where he died in 1516. His real name was Jheronimus van Aken.
He is famous for The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych, or painting in three hinged panels, that sets paradise, a crowd of naked pleasure seekers and a hell full of monsters side by side.
About two dozen paintings are accepted as his, and not one carries a date in his hand.
No letter by Bosch survives, no diary, no note on what any of his pictures mean. What remains is a paper trail kept by others in his town: a church brotherhood's accounts, a handful of payments, a funeral mass.
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In everyday Dutch he was Jeroen. Hieronymus is the Latin form of that first name, the one his contemporaries used in writing. His family name, van Aken, simply means "from Aachen," the German city just across today's Dutch border.
His ancestors had come from Aachen to Nijmegen, a Dutch town, before settling in 's-Hertogenbosch, today the capital of North Brabant, in the south of the Netherlands.
That town gave him the name he is known by. The Dutch shorten it to Den Bosch, and he signed some of his pictures Jheronimus Bosch.
Painting was the family trade. His grandfather Jan van Aken was a painter, and most of Jan's sons took up the work too. His father, Anthonius, was one of them, and either he or an uncle most likely taught the boy. None of their work survives.
Even his birth year is an estimate, worked out backward from a portrait drawing of him, probably a self-portrait, made shortly before his death. He grew up as a painter's son in a town of painters.
His hell made him famous, yet his best-known picture keeps a surprise on its outer doors. When The Garden of Earthly Delights is closed, it shows no devils at all.
Coats of arms, a marriage and a brotherhood
The town's records show a Bosch no one would guess from his hell: a married man, a member of a pious brotherhood and the master of a workshop that was paid for very plain work.
What You'll Discover
What the town paid him to paint.
What the closed doors hide.
Who first played the song in hell.
What the town records say about his death.
How a Spanish king came to own it.
Which of his paintings are disputed.