Hieronymous Bosch

jeroen DEN Bosch) (c.1450-c.1516. Dutch painter. Born in Brabant at Den Bosch, he did most of his work in that area. He received commissions from the Hapsburg ruler of much of the Low Countries, Philip, duke of Burgundy, grandfather of Philip II of Spain, who also liked Bosch's paintings and collected many of them at Madrid. Bosch is best known for his mature works (The Haywagon, the Garden of Delights, the Ship of Fools, etc.), which contain dreamlike vistas filled with fantastic details-weird hybrid figures, mixtures of human, mechanical, animal, vegetable-done with striking technique and vibrant color. His grotesquerie was imitated by Jan Mandijn and others; his landscape and color techniques were an important influence on Pieter Breughel as well as on lesser figures. Despite suggestions that he was connected with heretical sectarianism, his sometimes strange paintings can more easily be explained in terms of the more general late-Gothic use of fantasy in sculpture, mystery plays, and the like.

See L. Baldass, Hieronymus Bosch (1960).