Pieter Casteels

PIETER (PETER) CASTEELS Antwerp 1684 - 1749 Richmond, Surrey Pieter Casteels specialised in painting decorative arrangements of birds and flowers; following the death of Jacob Bogdani in 1724, he became the leading painter of this genre. Casteels was born in Antwerp in 1684, the son of the painter Pieter Casteels, with whom he trained. The younger Pieter came to England in 1708 accompanied by his brother-in-law, the landscape painter Peter Tillemans. Apart from a brief return to Antwerp in 1713 to enrol as a master of the painters’ guild, Casteels remained in England for the rest of his life. He became a member of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s Great Queen Street Academy in 1711 and a member of the Rose and Crown Club. Casteels’s flowerpieces and bird subjects commanded a large clientele and were often conceived as part of a decorative scheme to be used as overdoors or overmantels. The decorative function of these works dictated their proportions and Casteels’s compositions often have a low viewpoint, designed to be seen from below. He also painted small history paintings with architectural settings. Casteels moreover had a flourishing business as an art dealer, importing paintings from Europe for clients including James Stanley, 10th Earl of Derby. In 1726 Casteels etched a set of twelve prints of birds after his own designs, which sold successfully. In 1730 he made a series of flower paintings in collaboration with the engraver Henry Fletcher and the Kensington nurseryman Robert Furber. The Twelve Months of Flowers depicted plants that could be bought in Furber’s nursery; 457 copies of the set of prints after Casteels’s paintings were sold at 2gns each, and the trio followed the venture with Twelve Months of Fruit (1733). Casteels retired from painting in May 1735 and spent the rest of his life as a designer of calico patterns, first at Martin Abbey, near Tooting, and later at Richmond, Surrey. He died in Richmond on 16th May 1749. The work of Pieter Casteels is represented in Leeds City Art Gallery; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Co. Durham; the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.