Floris Verster

Floris Verster grew up inside a natural history museum. His father ran the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden and was a respected painter of birds, and as a boy Floris spent hours copying the stuffed animals in its cases. That close attention to still, lifeless nature stayed with him for good.

Born in Leiden in 1861, he trained at the Royal Academy in The Hague beside George Hendrik Breitner and Isaac Israëls, two painters who would drive Amsterdam's restless city Impressionism. Verster took a quieter road. In 1888 he broke through with an enormous canvas of flowers and leaves, and went on to remake the Dutch flower still life. Earlier masters had reached for rare and exotic blooms. He turned instead to the ordinary things around him, everyday plants, dead fowl, bottles and pots, painted close up and often life-size in rough strokes and strong colour.

He stayed in Leiden almost his whole life, working slowly and largely apart from the fashions of the capital. On a January morning in 1927 he was found dead in a pond near his home. What happened there was never established.