Christoffel van den Berghe

Christoffel van den Berghe worked in Middelburg, the trading port of Zeeland, and most of his pictures are small enough to hold in two hands. He painted bouquets and landscapes on copper, a smooth metal support that allowed very fine detail, and one vase of flowers he signed and dated in 1617 is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

His flowers follow the manner of Ambrosius Bosschaert, a Flemish-born flower painter who had settled in Middelburg, and he may have trained with him. He also painted a still life of dead birds that counts among the early Dutch game pieces, a subject that later became a genre of its own.

The documents about his life are few. He joined the Middelburg painters' guild in 1619 and served as its dean in 1621, the year he bought a house in the town. He still owned it in 1628, and after that the records lose track of him.