Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus Bosch was an Early Netherlandish painter whose singular, wildly imaginative visual language has captivated and bewildered viewers for half a millennium. Born Jheronimus van Aken in the thriving market town of 's-Hertogenbosch, he grew up in a family of painters and belonged to the prestigious religious Confraternity of Our Lady.

Bosch's monumental triptychs, most famously The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Haywain, and The Temptation of St. Anthony, teem with chimerical demons, nightmarish torture instruments, anthropomorphic machinery, and moral allegories of human folly. Rejecting conventional Italianate Renaissance perspective, his works combined late medieval dread with pioneering psychological surrealism, profoundly admired by King Philip II of Spain.