Simon Pietersz Verelst

Simon Pietersz Verelst was born in The Hague and baptized there on 21 September 1644, the son of the painter Pieter Hermansz Verelst, with whom he trained. In 1663 he became a pupil and member of the Confrerie Pictura, The Hague's painters' association, alongside his brother Herman Verelst, and in 1666 he joined the Guild of St. Luke in The Hague. Around 1668 to 1669 he moved to London, where the diarist Samuel Pepys recorded visiting him on 11 April 1669 and admired his flower painting, an encounter credited with helping establish his London reputation.

In England, Verelst built a following at the Stuart court. Charles II is recorded as having owned six of his paintings, and he found further patronage from the Duke of Buckingham and the Duke of York. The art historian Paul Taylor has judged that Verelst achieved great financial success as a portraitist without matching artistic distinction, and describes him as reportedly London's highest paid portrait painter at the height of his career. Later in his career, French reference sources describe a decline attributed to mental illness, alongside his self-adopted title "the God of Flowers."

The circumstances and date of his death are not settled. English language scholarship, following George Vertue's notebooks as interpreted by Paul Taylor, places his death somewhere between 1710 and 1717 in London. French and Dutch reference works, including Larousse and Wikidata, instead give 1721. No archival death or burial record has been securely tied to him; two possible burial entries for a "Symon/Simon Evret/Everet" at St Martin-in-the-Fields, in 1713 and 1720, are noted by researchers but not confirmed as his. What is agreed across all sources is that he died in London as a long resident of the city.

Contemporaries were divided in a way that still shapes how Verelst is discussed. The Dutch painter and theorist Gerard de Lairesse reportedly judged him the greatest of all flower painters, and Pepys's own admiration for his floral work in the 1660s helped launch his London career. Paul Taylor's modern assessment is more mixed, crediting Verelst with real commercial success as a portraitist while judging the portrait work itself to be middling rather than distinguished. No verbatim, independently verifiable quotation from a named critic has been located for this profile, so these assessments are presented here as paraphrase and attribution rather than direct quotation. The recurring theme across both eras is a gap between Verelst's market success, first as London's most fashionable flower painter and later as a favored court portraitist, and a more qualified critical judgment of the work itself.

Verelst's market is that of a minor but genuine Old Master name, traded intermittently through specialist dealers and auction houses rather than through any ongoing gallery representation. The highest documented auction price for his work is GBP 320,258, paid at Christie's in London in 2001 for "Roses, irises, poppies and other flowers in a glass vase"; the exact day and month of that sale are not confirmed in available records, only the year. Other results sit well below that figure: a Koller (Zurich) sale realized CHF 90,000, a Lempertz sale in November 2014 realized EUR 62,000, a more recent Lempertz sale in November 2025 realized EUR 16,380, and a Clars Auction Gallery still life realized about USD 13,100. This spread, a small number of results across two and a half decades with very wide variance, is typical of an artist whose surviving output is modest and whose attributions require specialist review.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Verelst, and no certificate program; attributions rest on connoisseurship, including review by RKD affiliated specialists such as Dr. Fred Meijer. Collectors should also take care to distinguish Simon Pietersz Verelst from his father, Pieter Hermansz Verelst, and his brother, Herman Verelst, both also working painters whose names and output are sometimes confused with his in the trade. His auction history is thin and widely spaced, so any single price, including the GBP 320,258 record set at Christie's London in 2001, should be read as a data point from a narrow and irregular market rather than as evidence of a stable trend. Finally, even his death date is unresolved among standard references, a reminder that provenance and documentary research matter as much as connoisseurship when evaluating a work attributed to him.