Ambrosius Bosschaert

Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (18 January 1573 – 1621) was a Flemish-born Dutch still life painter and art dealer. He is recognised as one of the earliest painters who created floral still lifes as an independent genre. He founded a dynasty of painters who continued his style of floral and fruit painting and turned Middelburg into the leading centre for flower painting in the Dutch Republic.

Biography

He was born in Antwerp, where he started his career, but he spent most of it in Middelburg (1587–1613), where he moved with his family because of the threat of religious persecution. He specialized in painting still lifes with flowers, which he signed with the monogram AB (the B in the A).

Bosschaert was one of the first artists to specialize in flower still life painting as a stand-alone subject. He started a tradition of painting detailed flower bouquets, which typically included tulips and roses, and inspired the genre of Dutch flower painting. Thanks to the booming seventeenth-century Dutch art market, he became highly successful, as the inscription on one of his paintings attests. His works commanded high prices although he never achieved the level of prestige of Jan Brueghel the Elder, the Antwerp master who contributed to the floral genre.

Legacy His sons and his pupil and brother-in-law, Balthasar van der Ast, were among those to uphold the Bosschaert dynasty which continued until the mid-17th century.

It may not be a coincidence that this trend coincided with a national obsession with exotic flowers which made flower portraits highly sought after.

Although he was highly in demand, he did not create many pieces because he was also employed as an art dealer.