Margaretha Roosenboomartist • painter • watercolourist • draughtsmanDen Haag 1843-1896 Voorburg

Margaretha Roosenboom was born in The Hague, but spent a large part of her youth in Brussels. There she received her first painting lessons from her father, the famous landscape painter N.J. Roosenboom. When she was 24, she moved in with her grandfather Andreas Schelfhout in The Hague and immediately started working in his studio, where he taught her watercolour techniques. Margaretha prefers to paint flowers in their most natural state, suitable in vases or as a bouquet placed loose on the forest floor. This means that her still lifes also include wild and spent flowers.

Flower painting developed in the second half of the 19th century. Still lifes had lost their moralistic undertone. With her way of painting, Roosenboom consciously breaks with the tradition of the 18th century, carefully arranged showpiece still life that consisted of many different types of flowers, rigidly arranged in a vase. She prefers to choose one type of flower – often roses – as the main motif of her paintings and watercolors. Sometimes she adds some fruit or another type of flower in a different colour. Around 1850, Gerardine van de Sande Bakhuyzen had already preceded her in this by loosely draping fruit and flowers on a stone plinth or the forest floor. But because Roosenboom excelled in watercolour technique, she was able to render the colours in her still lifes much more transparent and softer and her work had a greater impressionistic appearance. A contemporary wrote about her warm tones and specific use of colour: 'Vermeer had his own blue (...) Rembrandt his golden range of colours, Margaretha Roosenboom hair, nuances shining like pink pearls'. In 1887, Roosenboom moved in with her cousin Maria van Wielink and her husband, the landscape painter Johannes Gijsbertus Vogel, in Hilversum. Three years later they all move to Voorburg. When Maria died in 1892, Roosenboom married Vogel at the age of 49.

Together with Gerardine van de Sande Backhuyzen and Adriana Haanen, Roosenboom was one of the leading flower still life painters of that time. Her work was sought after and sold well. She regularly exhibited at the exhibitions of the Pulchri Studio in The Hague and the Amsterdam Arti et Amicitiae, but also at the exhibitions of Living Masters. She was also very successful abroad; she won a gold medal at the world exhibitions in Vienna (1873) and Chicago (1893), as well as at an exhibition in Atlanta. She signed her work with 'Marguerite' especially for the French market. After her death at the age of 53 as a result of an accidental fall, Roosenboom fell somewhat into oblivion. But nowadays there is again a lot of interest in the still lifes, which were progressive in their time, in which the natural appearance of the flower is the main motif.