The story
For three months in 2016 the small Dutch city of 's-Hertogenbosch became a pilgrimage site. Its regional museum, Het Noordbrabants Museum, had spent years persuading the world's great collections to lend, and for the 500th anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch's death it gathered most of his surviving paintings in the town where he was born and worked. More than 400,000 people came to stand before his panels of demons and burning cities.
The rest of the year it is a quieter place, telling the art and history of the province of North Brabant from a former government palace in the city centre. Its strength is closer to home in another way: Vincent van Gogh, who was born in Brabant and painted his early dark peasant scenes here, is represented in a shared gallery of his work. Bosch himself is not represented by a single painting in the collection, since none of his work stayed in the city that raised him.
