Art City Den Bosch - Jheronimus Bosch House

If you walk straight ahead from ‘s Hertogenbosch railway station, you will find yourself in the old town centre and on the market square. This is where the Van Aken family lived: not only the Den Bosch house, known as De Roosekrans, and the studio, but also the home where Hieronymus Bosch went to live with his wife after their marriage.

The house you are visiting here is considerably smaller than the actual house, as you can see from the scale model.
Much of what remains is original. When you enter, you can admire the original old floor beams through a pane of glass in the floor.
After the houses were rebuilt – presumably following the fire in the town centre – the house received less light. A sort of courtyard was built on the right-hand side, with recesses in the walls where candlesticks or oil lamps could be placed and sheltered from the wind.

Anyone entering this house is given an explanation on the ground floor and then watches a video which, at the end, explains how to proceed. After the ground floor, the tour continues down to the cellar!
So, there’s some stair-climbing involved.

The hardwood green staircase leading to the upper floor is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.

After leaving St Jacob’s Kerk where you find the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center, I walked back to the market square to have a look at the Bosch House. Or rather, the house where he lived till he married, which also served as the family’s studio.
Everyone was artistic and painted: his father, his uncles, you name it. Back then, no one objected to the idea that you had to be good at maths to be able to paint, or to the fact that they had to mix their own paints every day. Art school wasn’t necessary, nor was secondary education or primary school, let alone shops like De Kwast that rip you off. He learnt how to paint and everything related to it from his father, just like everyone else in those days, and who knows, perhaps from his uncles too.
It seems that not much was known about his private life. It turned out he was married and moved to the other side of the market square when he got married, where his wife lived. It is thought that he continued to use the same studio. From the lovely room (living room), you can see the market square and that house (the white house with the black balcony).

Anyone stepping inside the house is shown a clip from a documentary about life in Den Bosch in every room. The stench, the appearance, the fears were all very real, and people were left to stink in the wind for an hour. The average resident of Den Bosch was ugly, disfigured as a result of diseases such as leprosy, smallpox and so on. When Hieronymus died, pleurisy was rife. No one knows whether he actually died of it.
I left with a somewhat heavy heart, although he did live to a fairly old age for that time (after years of breathing in paint fumes); it certainly gives you food for thought. The situation in which people found themselves, the many diseases, certainly gave rise to visions and delusions. Education was non-existent back then; the church preached hell and damnation; the rivers were open sewers; and yet people knew how to get by, they traded, and Den Bosch became one of the four best-known and wealthiest towns in the region (the then Duchy).

There is also a cesspit to be seen in the cellar. This has yet to be investigated, and there is good reason to hope that valuable information can be gleaned from it as well.

What of his art? He was a gifted draughtsman, but the source of his inspiration remains a mystery. Presumably it was the influence of the era in which he lived – the doom and damnation preached by the Church, and the proverbs and sayings of the time – combined with an imagination that surpassed all else.
He remained loyal to the city and felt no call to move to so-called ‘art cities’. As a result, he was not influenced by groups of painters. Given that he was the only craftsman to be a member of the Brotherhood of the Swans – whose members included, in particular, clergy, the high nobility and the Dutch royal family – it seems that this, too, was a shrewd business move. In Den Bosch, he was well-known, much-loved and in high demand amongst the high nobility.

I left this house with a kind of sad feeling.

For anyone wondering: there’s plenty of art to see in ’s-Hertogenbosch, from Romanesque to Gothic churches, museums, murals and poems on the walls. You do need an eye for it, though.

And the dragon fountain, funded from the Duke’s estate, was there this time, although I’d expected the fountains to be a bit taller.

Den Bosch is certainly worth a visit. No ‘Bossche bol’ and no boat trip through the waterway and beneath the city. Perhaps next time, when it’s less cold and wet.

_{5-7-2026
Entry: 5 or 12 euros
The guided tour lasts 45 minutes
You’ll have to climb a few flights of stairs. But I believe there’s also a lift for part of the way. Toilets are available.}