Works by Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus Bosch filled oak panels with demons, hybrid beasts and crowds of naked figures, which scholars now read as moral lessons in line with the sermons of his day.

In The Garden of Earthly Delights a youthful God presents Eve to Adam on the left wing, and the wide centre is packed with naked figures, oversized fruit and pink and blue structures that look part rock, part plant. The right wing is hell at night, cold in colour, with frozen water and explosions lighting up a city gate. Where the Netherlandish tradition hid the brush under smooth glazes, Bosch sometimes worked sketchily and left the surface rough.

Born Jheronimus van Aken into a family of painters, he took his working name from his town, 's-Hertogenbosch, and lived in or near it all his life. Beyond brief entries in town and confraternity records, little of his life is known. In Cutting the Stone a man with a funnel for a hat works a blade into a seated man's scalp, and a woman looks on with a red book balanced on her head.

Only about 25 paintings and eight drawings are now given to him with confidence. In 2016 the Bosch Research and Conservation Project credited The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in Kansas City, long given to his workshop, to Bosch himself, and it has questioned whether The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things is by his own hand. Religious panels make up most of what follows, with a smaller share of drawings, among them The Owls' Nest, owls drawn in ink in a forked tree above flat country.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Museo del Prado, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.