Biography

Dutch painter. He was trained in The Hague in the studio of the portrait painter Constantijn Netscher before teaching himself the art of still-life painting. From 1716 he worked as a court painter to the Prince Palatinate Johann Wilhelm von der Pfalz in Dûsseldorf and in 1724 was enrolled in the painter's guild of The Hague, where he remained an active member until his death in 1748, collaborating with Matthias Terwesten on a programme of mural decorations which still partially survive today.

As a flower painter his work comes close to that of Rachel Ruysch, who was one of the best known and most successful female artists of the seventeenth century. Like her, Roepel painted his flower pieces with astonishing attention to detail and the most refined execution and his compositions continued the seventeenth-century traditions of decorative flower painting into the first quarter of the eighteenth century.

Roepel's work is widely represented in museums in Leipzig, Amsterdam, Kassel, Dresden, Prague and London.