Aert van den Bossche

Judging by his surname, Aert – a diminutive of Aernout or Arnould – van den Bossche must have come from ’s-Hertogenbosch, a town also known as Den Bosch. Son of the painter Yanne van den Bossche, he had a brother who was a hose maker and a stepbrother, Jan Vekeman, who was chaplain of the altar of the Eleven Thousand Virgins in the church of Saint Gudula (now the cathedral) in Brussels, the city where around 1489 Aert wedded Catharina van Hamme. Born about 1470, she was the daughter of Gillis van Hamme. The marriage brought Aert into an important family in the Netherlands. Two of Catharina’s brothers, Librecht and Hieronymus, were members of the Council of Brabant, and her niece Anna van Hamme, one of Hieronymus’s daughters, went on to marry anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). Aert and Catharina had a son, Gielis, and four daughters. In 1490 Aert is documented as an acht, a senior member of the Brussels guild of painters. He also became a member of the Council of Brussels, in whose municipal records he is referred to in 1495 as ‘Arnoul de Panhedel, called Vanden Bossche’ and in 1498 as ‘Arnoul van den Bosche’. In 1499 he is recorded as owning a house in Heembeek, north of Brussels. In 1506 he and his son Gielis moved to Bruges, where they appear as registered members of the Guild of Saint Luke. From 1522 to 1523 Gielis is documented as performing work for the church of Saint John, Sint-Janskerk, in ’s-Hertogenbosch, including the cleaning of certain paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) around 1545–46. There is one extant, fully documented work that can be attributed to Aert van den Bossche. In 1490 he undertook to paint an altarpiece depicting Saint Crispin for the chapel of the confraternity of Saints Crispin and Crispinian and the Brussels shoemakers’ guild in the church of Saint Nicholas, Sint-Niklaaskerk, for which he received the final payment in 1494. This altarpiece, which still survives, albeit dismembered and incomplete – the central panel is in Warsaw [fig. 4.2], the recto sides of the wings are in Brussels (Museum van de Stad Brussel, inv. K1977 1 and 2), and the versos in Moscow (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 4074 and 4075) – is essential to attributing other paintings to Van den Bossche. Some of its characteristics are reminiscent of Hugo van der Goes, to whose style the altarpiece had previously been likened. For this reason Van den Bossche has been considered a pupil of Goes. On the other hand, several of the paintings now attributed to him were formerly associated with the production of the Master of Saint Barbara, an artist with a conventional name coined by Max Friedländer on the basis of two scenes from this saint’s life in the basilica of the Holy Blood, Heilig-Bloedbasiliek, in Bruges, and the Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten in Brussels (inv. 6149), and whose creations follow in the wake of Rogier van der Weyden. One of the works now ascribed to Van den Bossche is the Altarpiece of Job in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne (J.J. Pérez Preciado, "Fifteenth-century netherlandish painting at the Museo Nacional del Prado. Catalogue raisonné", Museo del Prado, 2024, p. 64).