Florence Biddle ver Steeg

Florence Biddle ver Steeg was a St. Louis painter known primarily for her still-lifes, particularly of flowers. She was born in St. Louis and attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts in the 1910s.

Ver Steeg began exhibiting actively in St. Louis in 1915 as a member of the St. Louis Artists' Guild. She continued to regularly enter the Guild's annual Open Competitive Exhibition through the 1920s, and participated in that organization’s annual exhibition into the 1930s. As a member of the Guild, ver Steeg also became a fixture in the sub-group "Eight Women Painters," along with Emilie Gross, Florence Hazeltine, Martha Hoke, Agnes Lodwick, Cornelia Maury, Lillian Thoele and Eloise Wells.

Ver Steeg was originally trained as a miniaturist, a medium that requires careful technique and attention to detail. However, her mature work transitioned to larger-scale portraits and still-lifes, and exhibited a “loosening of technique" that qualified her as modernist or pre-modernist, according to art critic Emily Grant Hutchings. This may have been a result of ver Steeg's association with the North Shore Art Association in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she spent some time in the summer of 1928. While ver Steeg's still-lifes have been described as decorative, several critics also noted that she was very skilled with color, often deploying it symbolically in her compositions.

In addition to her painting, Ver Steeg was involved in educational activities in the St. Louis area. In the 1920s, ver Steeg presented a flower-painting demonstration as part of St. Louis City Art Museum’s popular children's art lessons. These lessons, organized by the museum’s supervisor of education, Mary Powell, were geared toward children ages four to sixteen and attracted as many as 500 students in one session.

In 1935, ver Steeg’s painting, Ancestral Chair, was selected from a pool of some 500 canvases for the All-Illinois Society of the Fine Arts Gold Star Award. Ver Steeg was one of only two awardees from Missouri, along with artist Julius Moessel.

Ver Steeg died in 1937 and is interred in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.