| Known as the earliest and best specialist in flower painting, Ambrosius imported the tradition from his native Flanders to Holland (Middelburg), where he settled around 1593. The son of Remish Protestants, Ambrosius must have been something of a prodigy, since at age twenty he achieved a high rank in the St. Luke's Guild of his adopted city, Middelburg. Neither his training nor his early development are known. His earliest dated painting, a still life of 1606, displays the subject he was to pursue throughout his career: flowers and fruit. His direction was undoubtedly encouraged by the growing Dutch enthusiasm for botany and horticulture. Married to Maria van der Ast around 1604, Bosschaert most likely trained her brother, the still life painter Balthasar van der Ast. Remaining in Middelburg until around 1613, Ambrosius was also a picture dealer, who sold a Veronese to a local collector. After 1613 Ambrosius was active in Bergen op Zoom, Utrecht (where he joined the guild in 1616), Breda, and The Hague, the city of his death. Influenced by the Remish traditions of his origins (particularly Jan [Velvet] Brueghel*), Ambrosius established the formula for flower painting that was followed by Dutch painters during the early decades of the seventeenth century. Within rather stiffly arranged bouquets, each flower could be seen and studied, and the whole was generally set in a niche contrasted with a landscape. Bosschaert based his paintings on carefully rendered individual nature studies, regularly recombining these painstaking "portraits" of various flowers into diverse floral arrangements. Occasional fruit still lifes are known. His sons – Ambrosius the Younger, Abraham, and Jan–were his pupils and followers. Today, Ambrosius the Elder's pictures are rare. |
