Flores Romani III, 2026 (detail)

Bas Meeuws

Photographic flower still lifes in the tradition of the Dutch Golden Age: impossible bouquets composed flower by flower from thousands of photographed blooms.

Selected works

Bas Meeuws fell for the flower painters of the Dutch Golden Age, for Ambrosius Bosschaert, Balthasar van der Ast and Jan Davidsz. de Heem, and for the wonder their bouquets were meant to stir in the people who stood before them. He set out to stir it again, with a camera instead of a brush. Season after season, at home and on his travels, he photographs every flower, every insect and every vase on its own, and files it away in an archive that now holds more than 17,000 blooms. Only later, at his desk, does the bouquet come together: spring tulips beside autumn dahlias, all in full bloom at once, an arrangement no vase has ever held. And somewhere in it, as the old masters would have wanted, a petal has fallen, a beetle is crawling, a snail is on its way. With Flores Romani, his newest series, the bouquets leave the Golden Age behind: wild flowers that came north with the Romans, gathered in Roman vessels from Museum Kam in Nijmegen and set before the walls of Roman houses in Xanten.

On view at PAN Amsterdam 2026, stand 85, 31 Oct – 8 Nov 2026

A bouquet of purple artichoke thistles, mallow, blue cornflowers and white wild carrot in a dark Roman pot on a wooden shelf, with a walnut and butterflies, against a beige Roman wall with red-brown bands. — On view
*Flores Romani III, 2026*
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 gsm, mounted on Dibond, framed
150 × 100 · 120 × 80 cm
Edition of 6 + 2 AP per format
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A dense bouquet of tulips, roses, iris and lilies in a stoneware vase against a dark blue ground. — *Untitled (#205), 2024*
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 gsm, framed behind museum glass; printed to order at any size between 70 and 150 cm high
150 × 97.5 cm
Edition of 12 + 2 AP
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White and orange parrot tulips in a white vase with orange decoration against a gold-leaf ground, with butterflies. — *Untitled (#210), 2024*
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 gsm, framed behind museum glass
75 × 50 cm
Edition of 12 + 2 AP
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A bouquet of tulips, roses and iris in a Delft blue vase before a window opening onto a Dutch landscape. — *Untitled (#189), 2022*
Fine art baryta print, mounted on Dibond behind acrylic glass
130 × 80 · 200 × 123 cm
Editions vary by format
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A dense bouquet of iris, tulips, peonies and roses in a stoneware pot on a wooden ledge against a gold ground, with fallen petals. — *Untitled (#212), 2025*
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 gsm, framed behind museum glass; printed to order at any size between 70 and 150 cm high
150 × 120 cm
Edition of 12 + 2 AP
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A single orchid stem with grasses in a slender white vase against a gold-leaf ground, with a piece of rose quartz on the ledge. — *Untitled (#209), 2024*
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 gsm, framed behind museum glass; printed to order at any size between 70 and 150 cm high
150 × 92.5 cm
Edition of 12 + 2 AP
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Wonder was very important in the art of flower painting in the Golden Age. I want my work to elicit that wonder again.
Bas Meeuws

Biography

Bas Meeuws (b. 1974, Heerlen) is a Dutch photographer who has devoted himself since 2010 to renewing the most Dutch of genres, the flower still life. He photographs every flower, insect and vase separately, across the seasons and on his travels, and composes his bouquets digitally from an archive of more than 17,000 individually photographed blooms. Like the seventeenth-century masters he admires, from Ambrosius Bosschaert and Balthasar van der Ast to Jan Davidsz. de Heem, he builds impossible bouquets: flowers from different seasons in full bloom at the same time, with no regard for scale, and here and there a wilted bloom, a beetle or a snail as a reminder of transience.

Meeuws’ work has been shown in museums and institutions in the Netherlands and abroad, including the Westfries Museum in Hoorn, Museum Jan van der Togt in Amstelveen, Museum Rockoxhuis in Antwerp, Paleis Het Loo, Rijksmuseum Muiderslot, Museum Ulm and the Royal Delft Museum, and in a travelling exhibition through India. Commissions include the Zonnebloemenboeket (2014), a still life with sunflowers from the MH17 crash site, and its sequel Ten Years After (2024) for the City of Amsterdam; De lieve lent by wintertijd for Rijksmuseum Muiderslot (2017–18); Impossible Bouquets for Diptyque Paris (2019); and the Royal Delft series (2022) for the exhibition Flowers in Blue. His monograph Flower Pieces: A Photographic Journey around the World (Lannoo, 2019) appeared in a third, fully revised edition in 2023. He lives and works in Eindhoven.

Selected exhibitions

2027 — Flower Art Museum, Aalsmeer (upcoming, spring 2027)
2024 — BLOOM, Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn (group)
2024 — Ten Years After, City Hall, Amsterdam
2023 — Flowers in Blue, Royal Delft Museum, Delft
2022 — In de floria, Dordts Patriciërshuis, Dordrecht
2021 — Kunstreichgewäsche, Museum Ulm (group)
2019 — A Photographic Journey around the World, Museum Jan, Amstelveen
2018 — Muiderslot meets Bas Meeuws, Rijksmuseum Muiderslot, Muiden
2017–18 — Spring in the Wintertime, travelling exhibition: New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Ahmedabad
2016 — Floralia, Gorkums Museum, Gorinchem (group)
2015 — Power Flower, Museum Rockoxhuis with KMSKA, Antwerp (group)
2015 — Zonnebloemenboeket, Museum Jan van der Togt, Amstelveen
2014 — Bloemenpaleis Het Loo, Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn (group)
2013 — FlowerCastle, Kasteel Keukenhof, Lisse (group)
2013 — Westfries Museum, Hoorn

Art fairs include PAN Amsterdam (since 2012), KunstRAI, Photofairs Shanghai, The Photography Show / AIPAD New York, India Art Fair, Photo London and Art Busan.

Selected collections

Westfries Museum, Hoorn; Rijksmuseum Muiderslot, Muiden; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands; Leiden University Library, Special Collections of Photography; Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore; Amsterdam UMC (VUmc); Maasstad Ziekenhuis, Rotterdam; Municipality of Amstelveen.

Publications

M. E. N. van den Heuvel, Y. Molenaar, R. Ek et al., Flower Pieces: A Photographic Journey around the World, Lannoo, Tielt, 2019; third, fully revised edition 2023
Spring in the Wintertime, with an essay by Ljiljana Ortolja-Baird, Bangalore, 2018
F. G. Meijer and K. van ’t Land, Photographic Flower Pieces, Bekking & Blitz, Amersfoort, 2013; English/Chinese edition, Taipei, 2015

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