12 Facts About Ambrosius Bosschaert

Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder was a Flemish-born Dutch still life painter and art dealer.

Ambrosius Bosschaert is recognised as one of the earliest painters who created floral still lifes as an independent genre.

Ambrosius Bosschaert 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.

Ambrosius Bosschaert was born in Antwerp, where he started his career, but he spent most of it in Middelburg, where he moved with his family because of the threat of religious persecution.

Ambrosius Bosschaert specialized in painting still lifes with flowers, which he signed with the monogram AB.

Not long after, Bosschaert married and established himself as a leading figure in the fashionable floral painting genre.

Ambrosius Bosschaert had three sons who all became flower painters: Ambrosius II, Johannes and Abraham.

Ambrosius Bosschaert later worked in Amsterdam, Bergen op Zoom, Utrecht, and Breda.

Ambrosius Bosschaert's bouquets were painted symmetrically and with scientific accuracy in small dimensions and normally on copper.

At the time of his death, Ambrosius Bosschaert was working on an important commission in the Hague.

Ambrosius Bosschaert was one of the first artists to specialize in flower still life painting as a stand-alone subject.

Ambrosius Bosschaert started a tradition of painting detailed flower bouquets, which typically included tulips and roses, and inspired the genre of Dutch flower painting.