Bram van Velde (Dutch, 1895–1981) is known for his lively, abstracted paintings, featuring expressive shapes and forms, drawing on the aesthetics of French Lyrical Abstraction. Van Velde was born in Holland, where his family was impoverished while he was a child, an experience that would affect him for the rest of his life. His family moved several times, finally settling in the Hague, where van Velde apprenticed with a painting and interior decorating company, and copied the works of Old Master painters. The owners of the company became van Velde’s patrons, enabling him to travel throughout Europe, where he was exposed to the work of Expressionist painters, prompting a complete breakthrough in his painting. Van Velde exhibited his work in Paris throughout the 1920s, and later moved to Corsica and then to Majorca in the early 1930s, creating his first abstracted still lifes, inspired by Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). In the late 1930s he painted a series of abstract compositions in gouache, using vibrant color and organic forms in expressive large-scale works. Van Velde stopped painting for a period of four years in 1941, resuming his work in 1945. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s his work was tepidly received, but by the late 1950s and 1960s he was exhibiting regularly and had admirers among a younger generation of artists, including those in the CoBrA movement. In 1976, van Velde was awarded a membership in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. He died in 1981, at 86 years old. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland.