Margaretha Roosenboom

Margaretha Cornelia Johanna Wilhelmina Roosenboom was born on 24 October 1843 in Voorburg, the daughter of the landscape painter Nicolaas Johannes Roosenboom and Maria Cornelia Margaretha Schelfhout. Some sources instead give The Hague as her birthplace. She grew up partly in Brussels, where her father gave her early instruction in the fundamentals of painting. In 1867 she returned to the Netherlands and studied watercolor technique in The Hague with her maternal grandfather, the celebrated landscape painter Andreas Schelfhout, continuing until his death in 1870. She was never admitted to a formal art academy, a common barrier for women artists of her generation, and her training remained entirely private.

She first exhibited at Pulchri Studio in The Hague in 1859, at age 16, and became a member of the society in 1878, showing there regularly alongside exhibitions at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam and at the Dutch Exhibitions of Living Masters. In 1892 she married the landscape painter Johannes Gijsbertus Vogel in Voorburg, and she sometimes signed later work with variants of her married name, including Vogel-Roosenboom.

Margaretha Roosenboom died in Voorburg on 26 December 1896, at the age of 53. According to the Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland and corroborating biographical sources, her death followed complications from an accidental fall.

Roosenboom was grouped in her own time with painters such as Gerardina van de Sande Bakhuyzen and Adriana Haanen as one of the leading flower still-life painters of the Dutch nineteenth century. Her international gold medals at Vienna, Chicago, and Atlanta reflect a reputation that extended well beyond the Netherlands during her lifetime.

Roosenboom's market is small and runs mainly through specialist European dealers rather than headline auction sales. Simonis and Buunk and Galerie Trompenburgh have listed still-life paintings from her hand for sale, though specific asking prices are not documented in the sources reviewed for this profile. Public auction databases show inconsistent results for her work: one aggregator cites a high result near EUR 17,500 for a work sold at Christie's, while another lists a lower result near GBP 6,400 attributed to Bonhams. In both cases the exact sale date and full lot details are not consistently confirmed across sources, so no single all-time auction record can be reported here with confidence.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Margaretha Roosenboom, and attribution rests on signature, provenance, and comparison with the documented paintings in Dutch public collections, including the Rijksmuseum, Museum Mesdag, and the Centraal Museum. Buyers should be aware of her signature and name variants, since works surface under Margaretha Roosenboom, Marguerite, Mary Roosenboom, and the married forms Vogel-Roosenboom or Roosenboom-Vogel, all referring to the same artist. Because reliable, itemized auction data is sparse and much of her market moves through private dealers, collectors should treat any single price point with caution and verify comparables directly with specialist galleries before relying on it.