Bosch's actual name was Jeroen van Aken. He adopted the professional name Hieronymus Bosch from 's-Hertogenbosch, the town where he lived and worked, an urbanised, industrial city known for its textile manufacture and its trade links across northern Europe and into Italy^[3]. Painting ran in the family: his grandfather, his father, three of his uncles and one of his two brothers were all artists, giving him a route into the trade that had nothing to do with formal academic training^[3].

Around 1486 Bosch became a sworn member of the Confraternity of Our Lady in 's-Hertogenbosch, a status shared by only about sixty people out of a membership of more than ten thousand and reserved mainly for clerics; highborn laymen instead joined a related group known as the Swan Brothers^[2]. Bosch had likely been educated at a Latin school and may have taken early steps toward ordination, possibly even receiving the tonsure. His advantageous marriage to the wealthy Aleid van de Meervenne, combined with his artistic talent, is thought to have opened the door to one of the most exclusive clubs in the Netherlands, whose members included prominent theologians, architects, physicians, scholars, musicians and nobles who met weekly and feasted together^[2]. The commissions Bosch received from the Burgundian nobility depended directly on these connections^[2].

Bosch's output was largely devotional, with several works treating the Passion of Christ, and he became especially known for populating such scenes with fantastic, demon-filled imagery^[1]. Many of the strange creatures and details in his paintings, unfamiliar or grotesque to a modern eye, were drawn from Flemish proverbs and religious symbolism that would have been immediately legible to his contemporaries, even as their meaning has grown obscure to later viewers^[1]. Bosch painted every fantastical figure with the same conviction and realism he gave to ordinary human and animal subjects, a quality that has struck later audiences as strikingly modern.