The Hieronymus mentioned in the title of this Sonia Gechtoff painting is almost certainly Hieronymus Bosch, the famed early Netherlandish painter.

Gechtoff has a similar painting from 1988 titled Hiroshige Revisited, displaying a range of artistic inspiration for her work, as Utagawa Hiroshige was an 18th century Japanese printmaker. Hieronymus was famous for his bizarre religious paintings. However, unlike most religious artists, Hieronymus’s work has less to do with the Bible and rather has more to do with Catholic mythology. Much of Hieronymus’s work features strange images of medieval imagination, often complete with various demons and fantastical monsters. Hieronymus has always been a major inspiration for modern artists, mostly because his work is so wacky. One of his most famous paintings, The Garden of Earthly Delights, features unicorns, people skinny dipping with a giant black berry, and a guy putting flowers up his friend’s butt, amongst other weird and wonderful scenes. His work is regularly referenced by Surrealists, especially Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst.

Gechtoff, as an abstract artist, would not have had much space in her work for narrative, figural imagery. So, what exactly was she getting out of Bosch's work that influenced this one? We can find the answer looking at her other “revisited” work. In Hiroshige Revisited, Gechtoff again produces an abstract work that is mostly divorced from the work of the artist she is referencing. Key word here is “mostly." Hiroshige’s work, while far from abstract, does use lots of flat planes of color, due to the nature of the ukiyo-e screenprinting process. This is echoed in Gechtoff’s piece. When we look for a similar pattern between her work and Bosch's, we find that Bosch utilized numerous figures in his work, filling it with minute detail. While Gexhtoff’s piece doesn’t contain figures explicitly, she does create a number of individual smudges, used to create a density that is similar to Bosch's tableaux.

 This painting was done in 1957, an era dominated in the United States by Abstract Expressionism. Innovations such as Jackson Pollock’s drip method inspired other artists to experiment with ways of putting paint on the canvas. Here, Gechtoff was perfecting her palette knife technique, known for creating textured images like Starry Night.