The holy Jacob and the magician Hermogenes

This panel depicting the conflict between the holy Jacob (Saint James) and the magician Hermogenes derives from the Golden Legend and was a subject Bosch explored with characteristic inventiveness. The version in Valenciennes, dated to about 1550, is likely a workshop copy or follower's piece based on a lost Bosch original, perpetuating his fantastic imagery after his death in 1516. Hieronymus Bosch, working in the southern Netherlands in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, created a body of work that has no parallel in Western art for the consistency and originality of its imaginative vision. His hybrid creatures — composites of animal, vegetable, mineral, and human that populate his hellscapes and temptation scenes — belong to a coherent private mythology whose sources (medieval bestiaries, alchemical imagery, folklore, Biblical commentary) have been extensively studied without being definitively decoded. What is clear is that Bosch's imagery served both the devotional needs of his time — warning against sin, depicting the consequences of moral failure — and an imaginative freedom that transcended any single interpretive framework, making him an inexhaustible resource for subsequent European artists seeking to represent the limits of the human imagination.

The composition teems with Boschian demonic creatures and surreal transformations, though the handling suggests a follower's hand—slightly stiffer in execution than the master's own fluid, hallucinatory technique.