Margaretha Roosenboom artwork • watercolour • drawing • previously for sale A still life with peonies and hedge bindweed

The first painting lessons Margaretha Roosenboom had were from her father, N.J. Roosenboom, while her grandfather, Andreas Schelfhout, taught her the art of watercolour. She preferred painting flowers in their most natural state, arranged in vases or casually put down in a bunch on a forest floor or stone plinth. Consequently, also wild flowers or those that have already flowered appear in her still lifes. In this she deliberately broke with the 18th century tradition of carefully arranged, extravagant still lifes. Often a particular type of flower, like a rose, formed the centrepiece of her paintings and watercolours. About her warm tones and distinctive use of colour, a contemporary of hers wrote: ‘Vermeer had his own blue…Rembrandt his golden colour spectrum, Margaretha Roosenboom her subtle distinctions, shining like pink pearls’.